Pine Labs, a merchant platform company, sees debit card-based EMI offering a big growth driver for the company this fiscal, and targets to enable debit EMI for 10 crore consumers by March-end next year, a top official said.

“We have, as of today, enabled debit EMI alone for more than three crore consumers. We are looking to raise this to 10 crore consumers this fiscal. Debit EMI offering business has grown more than 500 per cent in April, May, and June this year,” Kush Mehra, Chief Business Officer, Pine Labs, told BusinessLine .

He said the growth of debit EMI in the recent quarter was fuelled by a special campaign the company and its partners ran for air conditioners. “We want to partner with other industry segments such as beauty and wellness, furniture and home décor, education, healthcare, automobiles, sport fitness and outdoors, and travel and tourism to help customers avail easy affordability solutions,” he said.

India has over 90 crore debit cards in circulation and is used mostly for cash withdrawals from ATMs. Now the consumer behaviour has seen a change and more Indians are starting to use debit cards at retail stores. This has enabled players such as Pine Labs to tailor EMI-based products in partnership with banks for such consumers.

As of today, Pine Labs has enabled its EMI offering via credit and debit cards for 85,000 merchants. It has an extensive network of more than 90 brands and 19 banks and financial services organisations that power EMI transactions for customers.

Mehra said that Pine Labs serves about one lakh unique merchants, and has PoS terminals at nearly four lakh touch points across the country. The annualised payments value stood at $24 billion, he said.

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