In a change of tack, TruPay, a less than two-year-old fintech startup, has decided to alter its business model so as 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, said in an interaction with BusinessLine .
The resources that would be spent on merchant solutions would 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.
“We are taking a strategic shift because we have to adapt. We were not anticipating UPI to come. Now that UPI is a reality and the government itself is 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 and that too targeted at merchants. At the same time, there is no plan to move away from retail consumers also.
“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 the year 2017," Vivek said.
Asked how the arrival of UPI impacted business, Vivek said that “in one way, it has made our life easier.. in another way, it has destroyed our potential patent”
E-wallet killer
Going forward, Vivek felt that 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 value of transactions put through Unified Payments Interface--which was launched in India in second half of 2016--surpasses those by e-wallets in aggregate in next quarter, Vivek said. Already UPI stood at 60 per cent of the e-wallets transactions in aggregate.
In June 2016, when TruPay payment app was launched, it sought to achieve what UPI has successfully enabled today.
“If 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 UPI, as many as 36 banks are live on UPI," Vivek said
The key offering of TruPay was that it allowed seamless bank-to-bank transfer of funds through mobile application without having to use the services of a e-wallet.
Money could be transferred between two mobiles whose numbers are registered with their individual banks and they were part of each other’s contact list too. Moving payments between bank accounts through mobiles was an offering that was introduced by TruPay even before UPI came into the scene.