IPO-bound MobiKwik is leveraging its Pocket UPI offering for a bigger unified payments interface (UPI) market share.
The company’s share in wallet transaction value rose to 23.1% in May from 11.3% in March, according to latest data from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). It also recorded the largest number of prepaid payment instrument wallet transactions by value during the month, at Rs 2,673 crore.
“Pocket UPI will help us be in the UPI ecosystem, while simultaneously pushing the user to maintain a wallet balance. It will also give us the capability to earn a merchant discount rate,” Upasana Taku, co-founder and chief financial officer, MobiKwik, said. The company wants to make sure it remains a “reasonably relevant player” in the overall payments ecosystem in India, according to Taku.
Pocket UPI, which MobiKwik rolled out in February, enables users to make UPI payments through the firm’s wallet without linking their bank account. The widespread adoption of the platform in Tier 2 and 3 cities has helped increase wallet transactions.
Though it captured nearly a fourth of the market share in wallet transaction value in May, it has only a 0.12% share in the overall UPI transaction market, dominated by PhonePe and Google Pay.
Taku said the company will continue to invest in acquiring “the right type” of users and merchants. “We are not running with a strategy where we need to have the highest number of transactions or the highest number of payment users in India. Frankly, we do not have the backing of a trillion-dollar entity like Google or Walmart,” she said.
For the six months ended September 30, the company posted a net profit of nearly Rs 9.5 crore, after declaring a net loss for the preceding three financial years, its draft red herring prospectus showed.
The consolidated revenue from operations was Rs 381 crore in the first half of FY24. The financial services business, which includes MobiKwik Zip, Zip EMI (a longer tenure credit product) and other credit products comprised 64% of total revenue. The payments vertical, which includes Pocket UPI, constitutes the remaining 36%.
