After Xiaomi and Realme, OPPO Launches Financial Services App in India The beta version of OPPO Kash app will offer screen insurance, loans, free credit report and mutual fund investments

OPPO is the latest smartphone brand to jump on the financial services bandwagon in India with the launch of OPPO Kash. Sumit Walia, VP, OPPO told Entrepreneur India that the objective of OPPO Kash is to provide end-to-end financial services to Indian consumers.

Realme and Xiaomi are the other smartphone giants that offer credit, investment and other financial products through their apps PaySa and Mi Credit, respectively.

For starters, beta version of OPPO Kash has been launched to run a pilot in select stores for six months. The company is piloting a phygital acquisition model leveraging their 3 lakh sales promoters in ~60,000 stores across India to cross sell financial products, a statement said.

The beta version will offer five products—smartphone screen insurance, personal loan, business loan, free credit report and mutual fund investments—with "Freedom SIP' being claimed as a unique product offered by the app.

Currently, the app is only available for Android users.

What's on Offer?

Freedom SIP

OPPO has tied up with ICICI Prudential for "Freedom SIP' plan. Through this product, investors will be able to invest among the eligible schemes of ICICI Prudential mutual fund with as low as INR 100 per month. But, there's a catch. This scheme comes with a lock-in of 8, 10, 12 or 15 years.

The investor will have to choose a tenure as per his needs, invest a fixed amount every month through the selected tenure and on its completion, the accumulated corpus will be transfered to a hybrid scheme for withdrawal through systematic withdrawal plan (SWP). The withdrawal amount will also be pre-fixed depending on the SIP amount and the investment tenure.

On being asked how is it different from a regular mutual fund SIP plan, Zafar Imam, Lead – OPPO Kash said "Freedom SIP' is a saving product and not an investment product. "To give an example, if an investor invests INR 10,000 every month for 15 years, he will get a fixed income of INR 30,000. The idea is to get consumers to start saving for the long term," he said.

Entrepreneur India wrote to OPPO to seek more details on how the SWP amount is determined but did not get a response till the time of filing the story.

Apart from "Freedom SIP', the platform will also offer regular plans of all types of mutual fund schemes and claims to be the first smartphone brand to do that.

Loans

For loan offerings, the chinese smartphone maker has tied up with fintech startups EarlySalary and Lendingkart for personal loans and business loans, respectively, for the trial period. "OPPO Kash will just be the distributer whereas the loan disbursal decision, from accessing the borrower's risk to deciding the interest rate on the loan, will all be handled by the lending partner," Imam said.

Salaried individuals with monthly income of INR 18,000 or above will be eligible to take personal loans of up to INR 2 lakh for a period of 3-12 months. Business loans, on the other hand, of up to 2 crore will be available to self-employed individuals for longer duration of up to 3 years.

Insurance

To begin with, OPPO has tied up with ICICI Lombard to offer smartphone screen insurance, currently available only to OPPO smartphone users.

Credit Report

As part of their financial education initiative, the company will offer three free credit reports in a year, in partnership with credit bureau Equifax.

Future Plans

OPPO Kash has aggressive expansion plans in India, Walia told Entrepreneur India.

Going forward, the platform aims to add life and non-life insurance products, durable loans with EMI financing option, payments service and onboard more lending partners. "From the loans perspective, once we reach a certain scale and set up a critical base of customers, we could even look at getting an NBFC license for ourselves," said Walia.