Sachin Bansal’s Navi overtakes Amazon Pay to emerge as fifth largest UPI player

Navi blazes past Amazon Pay to be fifth biggest UPI app

Sachin Bansal’s fintech Navi has taken over Amazon Pay to emerge as the country’s fifth-largest UPI player, as it continues to grow at breakneck speed, data available with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) shows.

NPCI operates UPI, India’s most widely used real-time payments systems.

Navi’s UPI transaction volumes have grown 30 times in the past six months, which has seen it leapfrog from 27th position in March to fifth in August. From three million transactions in March, Navi zoomed to 89 million in August.

At 89 million, the Bengaluru-based non-banking financial company’s transactions were also up 30 percent from 69 million in July. The company started offering cashbacks for UPI payments in April.

The top three, however, have remained unchanged for the past four years. PhonePe is the biggest UPI player in the country followed by Google Pay and then Paytm.

Navi, whose primary line of business is lending, managed a growth of 30 percent from a relatively higher base. Most of its peers have grown only at around 10 percent or less from the previous month.

Amazon Pay, which had an almost identical scale in July and a much higher overall user base, saw a decline in the number of transactions in August.

Over the past six months, WhatsApp Pay has registered a 45 percent growth, the second highest among the tier-two UPI apps. Despite the growth, the instant messaging app's transactions are half of Navi’s.

Unchanged top order 

Even as Navi has seen spectacular growth, its market share of the UPI ecosystem is at 0.6 percent.

Market leader PhonePe has around 48 percent share, Google Pay around 37 percent and Paytm  is a distant third at 7 percent. Cred, which is in the fourth spot, accounts for over a percent of the UPI transactions.

Navi offers instant personal loans, home loans, bill payments, insurance, digital gold and mutual funds on its app. Unlike other fintech and UPI apps, other than bill payments and digital gold, Navi is a manufacturer of these products and not a third-party distributor.

NPCI had plans to curb the dominance with a market share cap but is likely to postpone the year-end deadline because of the implementation challenges.

The initial plan was to ensure that no single UPI app has more than 30 percent of the market share but today, the top two — Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay —  together account for 85 percent of UPI transactions.

NPCI has spun off its BHIM app as a separate company to aggressively grow the market share and also appointed veteran banker Lalitha Nataraj as its chief executive officer. The growth of tier-two UPI apps does not count for much as far as the bigger picture goes. In fact, BHIM has seen a drop in the number of transactions over the last six months.