Flipkart founder Sachin Bansal’s fintech app Navi continued to grow its United Payments Interface business in the month of June, even as most other top 10 apps saw a decline in the number of transactions.
Navi registered a little under 36 million transactions in June, compared with the 30 million transactions it had registered in May. The fintech app had clocked 3 million transactions in March.
The 20 percent growth in month-on-month volume came even as UPI saw a marginal decline in the number of transactions from 14.04 billion in May to 13.89 billion in June. The decline is partly because June is shorter than May by a day.
Even more impressive was Navi’s growth in the value of transactions during June. The fintech recorded Rs 1,770 crore worth of transactions in the month, compared with Rs 958 crore worth of transactions it saw in May.
Interestingly, the unusual jump in transaction value indicates that the app is being used by existing Navi customers using the platform for loan repayments and buying insurance or mutual funds.
Since most of the merchant scan and pay transactions are below Rs 200 on average, the average ticket size tends to be smaller for UPI apps.
Navi offers instant personal loans, home loans, bill payments, insurance, digital gold and mutual funds on the app. Unlike several other fintech apps, other than bill payments and digital gold, Navi is a manufacturer of these products and not a third-party distributor.
Navi started offering rewards and cashbacks for unified payments interface (UPI) users on its platform in April.
Other apps
Meanwhile, Paytm has barely managed to hung to its 8 percent market share in June. The company has been steadily losing UPI market share since the Reserve Bank of India’s action on its associate company, Paytm Payments Bank Ltd (PPBL) in late January.
The company had close to 12 percent market share in UPI before the regulatory sanctions. Despite the transition from being a payments bank app to a third-party app, the company has managed to maintain its 8 percent market share for three months now. The company had to migrate every user from the PPBL platform to its new partners banks with customer permission, which has resulted in several users being inactive on Paytm UPI platform.
Meanwhile, Flipkart, which launched UPI payments on its app in March, has not seen any substantial growth in the number of transactions from around 5 million to around 6 million now.
Flipkart has two UPI platforms
Interestingly, Flipkart Group’s Super.Money launched its UPI app this month and is following a staggered launch. It had registered around 1.3 lakh transactions in June.
Meanwhile, Navi is Bansal’s second attempt at creating a UPI platform after he did the same at Flipkart back in 2016. When the e-commerce giant wanted a mobile payments platform, it acquired PhonePe, which was among the first apps to focus on UPI payments when prepaid mobile wallets were still more popular for mobile payments in the country.
Flipkart always wanted an independent UPI platform for driving mobile payments. However, the company’s ownership of PhonePe did not give the company full freedom to invest in its own payment product until PhonePe was hived off in late 2022.
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