Sachin Bansal's Navi UPI takes on giants | Fusion - WeRIndia

Navi, the fintech and lending app founded by Sachin Bansal, has seen a remarkable surge in UPI payments, growing tenfold over the past two months.

This growth has been largely fuelled by the generous cashback rewards that the app offers to its users.

In May, Navi recorded nearly 30 million UPI transactions. It is a significant increase from the 3 million transactions that it registered in March.

The app’s rapid rise in the UPI ecosystem has propelled it from the 27th position in March to the 11th in May, and if bank apps are excluded, Navi now ranks seventh. Despite this impressive growth, Navi’s share in the highly competitive UPI market remains small.

Even the app in the seventh position holds only a 0.2% market share, while dominant players like PhonePe and Google Pay, together command 87% of the market.

Nevertheless, Navi’s success is notable in a space where most UPI apps have scaled back on cashback incentives.

A Navi spokesperson attributed the app’s initial momentum to its rewards and cashback programs but emphasized that the app’s fast and reliable user experience has kept customers loyal.

The company is committed to enhancing the customer experience and building differentiated features to maintain this loyalty.

Navi’s success in the UPI space is Bansal’s second attempt at creating a UPI platform, following his earlier efforts with Flipkart, which acquired PhonePe in 2016.

Flipkart launched its own UPI payments platform in March 2024. It recorded 5 million transactions in its first month. While Navi’s initial growth is impressive, sustaining this momentum will be a challenge for it.

As past experiences with other apps like WhatsApp and Amazon have shown, cashback-driven growth can be fleeting. The real test for Navi will be maintaining customer loyalty once the cashbacks diminish.

With an average transaction value of ₹340, Navi is primarily used for merchant payments, a space where customer habits are hard to change. Nonetheless, if Navi can keep its users engaged, it may continue to climb the UPI ranks.

Image Credit: NPCI, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Source: http://www.npci.org.in/Brand-centre.aspx

Image Reference: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UPI-Logo.png