The new set of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) apps does not aim to build a 400-500 million customer base, said Prakash Sikaria, founder of super.money, a fintech app developing credit products on top of UPI. Flipkart-backed super.money officially launched the UPI app on Wednesday.
Sikaria said that players like super.money would rather focus on 30-40 million consumers for deeper and more regular engagement. super.money is part of the Flipkart Group and will focus on attracting young customers and those who are entering the workforce for the first time.
“We don't want to have 400 million people using UPI on us. We want to have 30-40 million people. Our objective is, we only want people to who we can cross-sell at least one financial product,” Sikaria said.
He added that these could be FD, a loan, a secured card, an unsecured card that the company manages to cross sell. But the success metric will be measured by what percentage of people it can cross-sell to, he said.
The company's initial offering includes a RuPay credit card linked to UPI. It also has plans to launch Fixed Deposits, and a secured card linked to the FD. It will also have personal unsecured loans on the platform. super.money already powers Flipkart's personal loans.
super.money has crossed one million downloads and has seen over 10 million transactions so far. During the month of July, the app saw around 2.5 million transactions compared to 1.3 lakh transactions it registered in June.
According to Sikaria, while Flipkart can reach more customers even for financial services, for deeper engagement companies need a dedicated focus.
“Flipkart can't reach the kind of customers that you want to attract and target. What happens with horizontals is that they do a good job from an acquisition perspective, but when you need deeper engagement into a category that is a little orthogonal to the horizontal, that is when a dedicated platform plays out well,” Sikaria said.
After two years of UPI apps trying to corner market share from PhonePe and Google Pay, finally, apps such as Cred, Navi and Fampay are seeing reasonable growth and scale. Sikaria predicts that a few apps will see 100 million transactions by the end of this year and calls it the second phase of UPI.
“The first phase of UPI was about the market creation where the top 2-3 players came in and spent tonnes of money and established UPI itself. Over the next 5 years you will see that there will be 10 players and a lot more even distribution of the UPI market share with different use cases with different customer segments as focus areas as people build new products on top of UPI,” Sikaria said.
super.money started operations a year ago and has been working in beta mode and launched UPI payments a month ago.
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