Sachin Bansal’s fintech app Navi, which grew 31 percent in October from the previous month, overtook Cred to become the fourth largest UPI app in the country behind PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm.
Navi registered 158 million transactions in October, up from 120 million in September, data available with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which runs UPI, shows.
Even though Navi’s incentives or cashbacks have come down from earlier months, its pace of growth has not.
Kunal Shah-led Cred’s transactions grew to 152 million from 140 million in September.
Flipkart Group’s UPI and fintech app super.money also doubled its number of transactions in October to 50 million.
Both Navi and Cred each have around 1 percent market share of UPI payments.
Market leader PhonePe has around 48 percent share, Google Pay 37 percent and Paytm is a distant third at 7 percent. super.money has around 0.3 percent market share, a 3x growth in a month.
There were several online and offline festive sales in October, boosting the UPI platform’s transaction growth by an 11 percent in and 14 percent in value compared to September.
In October, the Reserve Bank of India issued a directive to Navi Finserv and three more non-bank finance companies (NBFC) to stop lending from October 21, citing usurious lending practices which include high interest rates, unfair and hidden charges, and ever-greening of loans. The restrictions had no bearing on UPI transactions, which remained unaffected.
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.
Super.money is betting on selling credit products on UPI including a Rupay credit card, where the company has a wait list that has crossed a million, founder and CEO Prakash Sikaria has said.
The app was launched in late June, it followed a staggered approach and the official launch happened in August.
NPCI had plans to curb the dominance of a few apps with a market share cap but is expected to put off 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 not managed to grow its volume during the current financial year.
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