In 2020, PayU India to engage more with banks for digital payments push

PayU India, the market leader in the e-commerce payments space, is looking to make a big push into omni channel this year, according to the company’s CEO Anirban Mukherjee.

Besides, the fintech company plans to emerge as a large digital credit platform and build digital financial services this year, Mukherjee told BusinessLine.

“All the three segments — payments, credit platform and digital financial services – will be the focus areas this year. The big theme of 2020 will be to engage more with banks on all the three fronts. We do things on our own, but banks have deep relationships with merchants and consumers, and we want to work with them,” he said.

Omni channel payments

While continuing to operate in e-commerce payment, PayU India will focus on giving a big push into omni channel, said Mukherjee. “Consumers start payments on one channel and then move — they start on their mobile, then they go the store, they order online and return to the store, look at offers elsewhere. So most of our merchants have a presence online and offline. We are now building a fairly large initiative on omni channel,” he said.

Claiming that PayU India is the preferred payments partner for the top 200 merchants in the country, Mukherjee said: “We have done a lot and continue to innovate from the platform and product perspective, to improve the experience for merchants and consumers.”

PayU India also plans to make a big push into in-store payments. Further, one will see the company working more with Wibmo, an authentication services provider it has acquired, he added.

Consumer lending

PayU India will look to ramp up “very significantly” on consumer lending this year, said Mukherjee. “This will happen once PayU Finance comes together – with PaySense and LazyPay. We will be a very large digital credit platform within this year, offering all products —buy now pay later, EMI at the point of sale, and personal loans — all digitally led,” he said.

Going forward, PayU also plans to work with banks, partnering them and originating loans together. “Today we lend on our own books. We will partner with banks to co-lend in the coming days. Credit is a massively under-served problem in our country. We will start with consumer and eventually do SMB (small and medium businesses) lending as well,” he said.

While LazyPay — which does a lakh transactions per day — is the ‘buy now pay later’ product, PaySense is a recently acquired lending platform. Mukherjee said PayU Finance will become one business. ”We have complementary capabilities, we will take our own lending business and put it under the PayU Finance umbrella. The PaySense platform and what already existed within PayU Finance will be combined under PayU Finance,” he said.

Fintech ecosystem

PayU India is also looking to build fintech ecosystem. “We have made an investment in Fisdom. We will make a bunch of other investments. There will be a big push into fintech ecosystem — essentially digital financial services for consumers and small and medium businesses,” Mukherjee said.

Fisdom is working with banks, offering digital wealth products such as mutual funds, gold loans and insurance. They mostly offer services to bank customers both through physical branches and a digital app, he added.