Fintechs bet big on credit line on UPI for growth

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Fintechs are confident on Unified Payments Interface (UPI) credit lines picking up. Firms such as Jupiter, EaseBuzz, PayU are betting on bringing a credit card-like payment experience for consumers on UPI, according to company executives.

While RuPay credit cards on UPI was the starting point, now new and exiting fintech firms are also enabling the same.

“Given the success of UPI and its ubiquity, we strongly believe that credit line on UPI is the right product to democratise credit access in the country. It will also help in boosting growth for merchants and small businesses. We are in active conversations with few banks to build curated products for the consumers,” said Jitendra Gupta, Founder of neo banking start-up Jupiter.

Financial inclusion

The availability of a credit line on UPI will contribute to financial inclusion by extending credit services to a wider population, said Amit Kumar, Chief Technology Officer, Easebuzz.

“Users can access pre-approved credit line directly through the UPI platform. Credit on UPI will also bring flexibility of payment options to consumers and improve purchase completion rates,” he said.

He also said the firm is working with banking ecosystem to enable credit lines on UPI for their merchants by the end of December.

If a credit line gets activated on UPI, consumers can use UPI to pay while checking out and tap into the credit line to convert the payment into a pay later one.

The next big wave of UPI adoption will come from check out finance, or buy now pay later, said fintech industry insiders. Consumers will have a credit line extended by their banks to a specific account. They can use UPI to pay from the credit line.

With more than 11 billion UPI payments happening every month and more than 300 million users using the payment method, it is a huge market that is waiting to be tapped.

Currently, there are still discussions around the financials of the product as many fintechs are working with banks to go live. However, once the issues are addressed, the fintech industry looks to leverage credit lines on UPI.