Flipkart to launch its payment product within a month to drive transaction velocity

Flipkart will launch its payment product within a month, as it looks to bring back users more frequently and drive transaction velocity, its Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy told Moneycontrol.

Flipkart has been piloting its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) with a select set of users for some weeks now.

“The way the customer would want to pay, they will be able to pay. Again, if the customer wants to pay using UPI, they'll be able to pay. For the customer, the 500-600 million users who come on Flipkart… they want to make a payment, they want to make a flight booking, they want to buy medicines - that's the way we think about it. They will have a particular payment offering,” Krishnamurthy told Moneycontrol.

He added that it will follow this up with multiple financial services products that are likely to increase the frequency of its customers using the platform and enhance the customers’ purchasing power to buy more products on Flipkart.

“The bigger opportunity there what we are trying to do is frequency. We want people to keep coming back so that eventually they will do commerce. In my mind, payments and fintech, the word fintech is generally used quite loosely, is very different,” Krishnamurthy said.

To be sure, Flipkart had in last July launched a lending marketplace in partnership with banking partner Axis Bank. It also runs one of the country’s most successful credit card programmes, a cobranded card with Axis Bank, which has more than 4.5 million active consumers. Its buy now pay later product Flipkart Pay Later also has been around for a few years.

“For financial services – we are partnering with financial institutions. In India, if you just look at the way consumers buy high ASP (average selling price) products – televisions, refrigerators, or even expensive phones, they take some kind of lending product attached to the primary product. So, for us, that's very important to see it as part of the core value proposition for high ASP products,” Krishnamurthy said.

Krishnamurthy said that while the idea is to get customers to be able to afford more, Flipkart can also make money. “We believe there is an opportunity for us to make a little bit of money here from the financial institutions who we pass on the lead to. Payments is more about frequency, we want people to come back to Flipkart and do commerce,” he said.

Krishnamurthy added that the company has no ambitions to be a large payment or fintech company with its financial services foray.

“We are not trying to be the largest payments company in India. Again, no such ambition or don't even have the bandwidth or appetite to do anything close to that,” he added.