Sachin Bansal’s Navi UPI grows 10X in two months
Sachin Bansal‘s fintech and lending app Navi has grown its UPI payments 10 times in the last two months, helped by the handsome cashback rewards the company has been offering.
Navi clocked nearly 30 million UPI transactions in May compared to March, when it registered 3 million transactions. In April, the company clocked 15 million transactions.
The sudden spike in transactions lifted Navi from 27th position in March among top UPI apps to 11th position in May. If the bank apps are not considered for UPI ranking, Navi is already in seventh position. Now, Flipkart founder Bansal’s fintech app is at a striking distance of surpassing WhatsApp Pay, the defacto messaging app in the country, which reported 36 million transactions in May.
Interestingly, even an app in the seventh position commands only a 0.2 percent market share in the UPI ecosystem. The two dominant players – PhonePe and Google Pay – together command 87 percent market share with third-placed Paytm taking a little more than 8 percent, leaving all other major 70 UPI apps to fight for the remaining 5 percent.
Navi is among the very few UPI apps that are incentivising customers for regular UPI payments while most others have reduced their cashbacks dramatically over the last couple of years.
Navi offers instant personal loans, home loans, bill payments, insurance, digital gold and mutual funds on the app. Unlike several other fintech apps, other than bill payments and digital gold, Navi is a manufacturer of these products and not a third-party distributor.
Navi is becoming most popular made in India mobile app for UPI payments.
Sachin’s trifecta of UPI connections
Navi is Bansal’s second attempt at creating a UPI platform after he did the same at Flipkart back in 2016. When the ecommerce 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.
Earlier this year, Flipkart launched its UPI payments in beta and a full launch in March and the company registered 5 million transactions in the first month.In May, Flipkart again saw 4.5 million transactions, which are mostly facilitating payments for purchases made on the ecommerce platform.
So, Bansal is competing with both PhonePe and Flipkart UPI products.
The average transaction value of Navi is around Rs 340, which indicates that the app is being used mostly for merchant payments. The average value of a merchant transaction on UPI is Rs 632 whereas the average transaction value of a personal money transfer is Rs 2,845. Around 63 percent of all UPI transactions are merchant transactions.
