Fintech start-up Truepay to reorient focus on merchants

In a change of tack, Gurgaon-based Trupay, a less-than-two-year-old fintech start-up, has decided to alter its business model to mainly focus on developing solutions for merchants.

The recent rise of the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) and its growing popularity has prompted Trupay to now position itself completely on the merchant side, Vivek Loecheb, co-founder, Trupay told BusinessLine .

The resources that would be spent on merchant solutions will be far more than those spent on consumer-centric solutions. The proportion will move from say 50:50 to about 80: 20 in favour of merchants, he said.

“We are taking a strategic shift because we have to adapt. We were not anticipating for the UPI. Now that the UPI is a reality and with the government itself pushing a UPI-based app, we don’t want to compete there,” he said. The immediate focus will be on building new solutions for different use cases targeted at merchants. At the same time, there is no plan to move away from retail consumers.

“Our bread and butter will lie on the merchant side. We really want to become the go-to UPI player for any merchant. This is our aspiration for 2017,” Vivek said.

Asked how the arrival of the UPI impacted business, Vivek said: “In one way, it has made our life easier.. in an other way, it has destroyed our potential patent.”

Going forward, Vivek felt the UPI will be a e-wallet killer. “Wallets will have to transform themselves or they will die. It’s not going to take too much time. It’s a phenomenon that will happen in next 12 months,, he said.

Don’t be surprised if the value of transactions put through the UPI, which was launched in the second half of 2016, surpasses those by e-wallets in aggregate in the next quarter, Vivek said. Already the UPI stands at 60 per cent of e-wallets transactions in aggregate.

When Trupay payment app was launched in June 2016, it sought to achieve what the UPI has successfully enabled today.

“If the UPI had not come, we would have had a patent on the architecture that we were making. But it would have taken us five years to the stage we are today. With the government pushing the UPI, as many as 36 banks are live on the UPI,” Vivek said

The key offering of Trupay was that it allowed seamless bank-to-bank transfer of funds through a mobile application without having to use the services of an e-wallet.

Money could be transferred between two mobilephones whose numbers were registered with their individual banks and were part of each other’s contact list too.

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