Focusing on consumer finance, Capital Float acquires Walnut in deal worth $30 million

Capital Float has acquired Pune-based Walnut, makers of personal financial management (PFM) app, in a deal amounting to $30 million. The acquisition follows shortly after Capital Float announced its foray into the Consumer Finance vertical, emphasising a strong strategic focus on leveraging this lucrative borrower segment.

Walnut is a personal finance management mobile app that helps users to automatically track spends, bank and card balances, bill payments, and split expenses within a group, in just a few clicks.

In July 2017, Walnut launched “Walnut Prime”, an instant credit line that users can access on the app anywhere, anytime. This small ticket app-based credit line is centred on Walnut’s “Prime Credit Score”. While a traditional bureau score is derived basis existing loan and credit card repayment behaviour, the Prime Credit Score takes into consideration an alternate data range that includes one’s income, purchase behaviour, earning capacity and security savings. The data range also incorporates newer forms of consumption such as e-commerce, wallet, shopping, food, bills etc. giving an in-depth insight into the consumer’s behaviour, thereby enabling risk evaluation at granular levels. This proposition offers consumers with no credit exposure and no behaviour data, besides supporting the financial inclusion through digitalisation. Walnut claims to have recently crossed INR 100 crores in loans to users on its mobile app.

“Our sensibilities and objectives aligned with theirs, which largely paved the way for our decision to join hands with the company. Their approach towards leveraging technology to solve financial concerns of the common individual was particularly impressive,” said Sashank Rishyasringa and Gaurav Hinduja, co-founders of Capital Float, in a statement.