BENGALURU-HEADQUARTERED FINTECH Slice REPORTEDLY JOINS UPI RACE TO CHALLENGE PhonePe AND Google Pay
As startups double down to broaden their products offerings in various markets, Indian fintech Slice is also not left-out in this race, as a result, it’s adding the popular railroad UPI on its eponymous app as it pushes to become a one-stop payments app for consumers in the world’s second-largest internet market.
Headquartered in Bengaluru, which became a unicorn startup late last year made clear it is rolling out the UPI feature to all its existing users coupled with over 10 million of those who have been on its waitlist.
The subject startup offers customers credit card-like features, and via its app gives them access to a range of deals with popular merchants. While the UPI feature is nonetheless the latest addition to the company’s app, which aims to drive engagement as it gives users more reasons to interact with the startup’s offerings.
The founder and chief executive of Slice, ‘Rajan Bajaj’ in an interview, said that by leveraging UPI the payments app is opening the app to every smartphone user in the country.
In the meantime, UPI users on Slice will be able to create unique IDs that will allow them to search for their friends with the aid of their names instead of their phone numbers, as is popular on other UPI-supported apps. These unique IDs are powered by Andy, which is a web3 project that Slice has been working on since 2021.
“While building our UPI product, we ensured that we removed all the friction – there is no advertisement, there is no cross-selling, and there are no 100+ CTAs. The question we keep asking ourselves is ‘how can the user do this in one second or even less time?’ And we wanted to make this happen, now”, he said.
Fintech Slice is with this move entering a crowded market, more significantly with UPI support. As for the subject market, Google’s Gpay and Flipkart-backed PhonePe currently lead the UPI chart with more than 80% of the market share. Although, a number of other players including Paytm and Tata Neu also offer support for UPI payments.
UPI is a five-year-old payments protocol built by a coalition of retail banks and is believed to be the most popular process by which Indians transact money online. During this year precisely in the month of April, the payments protocol network processed more than 5.5 billion transactions, up from 7.2 million during the same period four years ago.
UPI network, which is supported by over 300 banks, allows users on one app to send money to any other user on any other UPI app.
“The payments network in India is very open with interoperability”, said Bajaj. “I believe that a product with the best consumer experience will eventually win people’s hearts. The significant growth which we have seen in the last few years on our slice super card proves that we have really struck a chord culturally with our consumers and they would love to use us for all their payment needs”.
Fintech Slice, which is backed by Insight Partners and Tiger Global, made clear that it aims to turn its credit business profitable in the coming months. Noting that, “As Slice turns profitable in the core product, the company will increasingly be using the free cash flows from there to increase the scope of what Slice stands for its consumers”.
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