Navi founder Sachin Bansal criticised WhatsApp Pay and Amazon Pay claiming that their poor integration of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments has limited the impact in India's fintech space.
At Redseer's Ground Zero event in Bengaluru on March 6, Bansal said, "People have spent money but they haven't done justice to UPI. Whether you look at Amazon Pay, Flipkart's early attempts, or WhatsApp Pay, none of them made UPI a core focus.”
UPI being used as a "side" feature
According to the Navi boss, these bigshot companies treated the instant payment system as a side feature rather than treating it as a core product.
"On WhatsApp, it’s hard to even find where UPI is. On Amazon, it’s impossible to figure out where to go to use it. Everyone has just tried a bit of UPI as a side feature but we made it the front and centre of our business," he added.
On October 18, the Reserve Bank of India restricted Navi from lending for around 40 days, before allowing it to restart issuing credit products to its customers.
According to RBI, the financial services company was charging usurious interest from consumers, and was evergreening loans, pushing customers below Rs 1 lakh segments into indebtedness.
However, the restrictions were lifted on December 2.
The fourth-largest UPI player, Navi has surpassed competitors on speed, number of taps required for payments, and transaction success rates.
"We track a lot of customer benchmarks, and we have exceeded most of them compared to competitors," Bansal shared.
Crediting the NPCI, which operates the payments space, and the government for supporting smaller players in this space, Bansal expressed the scale of the UPI economy would reach heights.
"We believe the future of UPI is eventually credit-driven, not debit-driven. Imagine when 10-30 percent of all UPI transactions are credit-based. The scale of this economy will be unimaginable," he said.
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