Sachin Bansal’s fintech firm Navi has registered blistering growth on UPI platform, almost doubling the number of transactions done through the app, data available with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which operates the Unified Payment Interface.
Navi reported 68.5 million transactions in July, up from 35.7 million in the previous month. In March, the number was only 3 million, a 22 times growth in just four months.
The value of transactions also doubled in a month to Rs 3,600 crore in July from Rs 1,800 crore in June. In March, Navi’s UPI transactions were worth less than Rs 100 crore.
UPI is the country’s most popular digital payments product, accounting for more than 80 percent of all such transactions in India. The platform saw over 14.4 billion transactions worth over Rs 20.6 lakh crore in July.
The growth has lifted Navi from 27th position in March to sixth in July. It is closely behind Amazon Pay, which recorded 72.4 million transactions in July. If the Bansal’s app maintains the momentum, it can surpass Amazon Pay to be the fifth largest UPI app.
Other UPI apps
NPCI has been for long trying to promote smaller UPI apps to reduce the duopolistic nature of digital payments in India where PhonePe and Google Pay together control around 87 percent of the market.
While the quasi-regulator NPCI had plans to curb the dominance with a market share cap, it is likely to postpone the year-end deadline because of the implementation challenges.
Navi’s growth, however, does not count for much as far as the larger picture goes. It only has 0.5 percent market share on the UPI platform.
Leader PhonePe had a market share of 48.3 percent, Google Pay 37 percent and Paytm 7.8 percent.
Navi started offering rewards and cashbacks for UPI users on its platform in April, kickstarting its growth phase.
Navi offers instant personal and home loans, bill payments, insurance, digital gold and mutual funds through the app. Unlike other fintech apps, other than bill payments and digital gold, Navi is a manufacturer of these products and not a third-party distributor.
Flipkart’s multiple UPI apps
Flipkart UPI, which launched UPI payments on its app in March, grew to 7 million transactions in July from around 6 million in the previous month.
Another Flipkart Group company, Super.Money app, saw around 2.5 million transactions in July against 1.3 lakh in June.
Navi is Bansal’s second attempt at creating a UPI platform after he did the same at Flipkart 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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