Flipkart-backed super.money joins UPI app race

Ecommerce giant Flipkart-backed financial services platform SuperMoney has now rolled out its credit-first UPI app to all users on Android, after its beta launch in June this year.

The fintech platform, structured as a Flipkart subsidiary, will also roll out its credit-on-UPI product after two weeks, said a company executive. 

“In the beta phase, the RuPay card and bank account-linked UPI service was open to all users and saw 1 million downloads and over 10 million transactions ... The credit-on-UPI product was limited to a few hundred users and we have started waitlisting users for the roll-out,” Prakash Sikaria, Founder and CEO of super.money told YourStory.

Sikaria had served as senior vice president heading growth at Flipkart for eight years, driving marketing, ads and Shopsy. He was also on the board of travel platform Cleartrip before building super.money. 

Backed by Flipkart, with a separate cap table and ESOP structure, super.money will fill the gap left by the demerger of PhonePe from the Flipkart Group into a separate entity in April, 2023. The new entity, super.money, currently has a team of 80 people with 70% of the staff engaged in product development and engineering. 

However, super.money does not want to be a lifestyle app similar to CRED or a payment app similar to PhonePe, which currently commands nearly half the market share of UPI payments in terms of transaction volumes.

“By December 2024, our aim is to be among the top five apps in the UPI space. As we see the market currently, by the end of the year there will be four to five players clocking nearly 100 million transactions on their platforms, and the market share will see better distribution over the next few years,” said Sikaria.

UPI transaction volumes stood at 14.4 billion for July 2024, clocking Rs 20.64 trillion crore in value. 

Sikaria said that the fintech platform was focused on the digital native young customers, leveraging Flipkart’s distribution to reach out to the target group.

“The instance of offline payments is higher than online and hence UPI increases the relevance of the product for the customers. We are looking to acquire the customers through Flipkart and our own marketing, who will leave a greater footprint on the super.money app through offers, financial product use, gamification and other strategies,” he added. 

The platform will introduce multiple financial products for consumers over the next two to three months, including fixed deposit products, personal loans, as well as other credit and payment products.

While the app is focused on consumer-facing financial products and product market fit for its UPI-led products, the platform is likely to explore business-to-business financial products at a later date, said Sikaria.