Navi, super.money building on UPI gains, Cred's share stagnant since April 2024

New UPI apps register good growth, but trails the top two

Sachin Bansal’s fintech startup Navi has continued its momentum into the new year, posting a 20 percent month-on-month (MoM) growth in January for the world’s largest real-time mobile payments platform - the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

Flipkart Group’s credit and payments startup super.money too has continued to grow at a rapid pace, registering a 24 percent MoM growth during in January, as per data available with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the entity that operates UPI.

Navi registered around 243 million transactions and super.money facilitated around 125 million transactions.

Meanwhile, Kunal Shah-led credit card bill payment app Cred saw its UPI payments continue to stagnate below 140 million monthly transactions since April last year. Cred's value of transactions too grew at a slow pace of around Rs 50,000 crore during January, representing a growth of 16 percent since April 2024.

Navi and super.money currently offer around one percent cashback on UPI payments, which pales in comparison to the handsome rewards that the apps were doling out in 2024. Irrespective of the low cashbacks, both the companies continue to see rapid growth in UPI transactions.

Navi, Cred and super.money, all three contribute only a minuscule part to the UPI transaction volume, and their January market share has been 1.4 percent, 0.8 percent and 0.7 percent respectively.

PhonePe and Google Pay are way ahead

Late last year, NPCI extended the implementation of its 30 percent market cap by two more years, a rule that stipulates no single third party UPI app should have more than 30 percent share of the UPI transaction volume.

PhonePe facilitates around 48 percent of the UPI transactions, while Google Pay users do around 37 percent transactions, together cornering 85 percent of the market.

NPCI has been trying to control the duopolistic nature of the platform by approving more than 20 third party apps last year. While Navi and super.money have made inroads, which many were previously not able to, it has not been enough to dislodge the top two players.

UPI is India's most popular payments platform, accounting for around 83 percent of all digital transactions. The value of UPI transactions in a month is more than 10 times the credit card transaction value.

In January, UPI did around 17 billion transactions, valued at more than Rs 23.5 lakh crore. The platform closed 2024 with over 172 billion transactions worth over Rs 245 lakh crore.