Will the PhonePe acquisition turn out to be Flipkart’s master stroke?
Himansu sekhar samal
A couple of weeks ago,payments startup PhonePe, founded by
ex-Flipkart executives Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari, was acquired by
their former employer in under six months of the duo leaving the
company. Now that it is in the Flipkart fold, PhonePe will have access
to financial resources to experiment on at least 40 million consumers
and their payment habits. PhonePe, in essence, was to be an app that
would use an HTML 5 platform to settle payments between merchants,
mobile shopping destinations and consumers with a single identity
provided by the Unified Payment Interface(UPI). Now, Flipkart’s
acquisition is significant considering UPI was launched a couple of days
ago by the National Payments Council of India (NPCI) to facilitate
settling payments in a cashless and card-less manner through a single
identity. The UPI will use Aadhaar’s biometric data to authenticate
transactions.
Sameer Nigam(L) and Rahul Chari(R) – Founders of PhonePe
With this acquisition, the larger role for Flipkart is to become the
checking house for merchant payments after collecting cash from the
consumers. Now PhonePe, on top of the UPI platform, is going to make
payments seamless for Flipkart. The UPI had recently opened up APIs to
startups so that they could build apps that could settle payments and
make it convenient to Indians. The objective is to reduce commission
structures of banks and international credit/debit settlement platforms,
which charge exorbitant commissions,ranging from 1.4 to 1.6 percent per
transaction. With Flipkart transacting with at least three million
Indians on a monthly basis, the opportunity to offer this convenience is
irresistible. However, these are early days and consumers should
consciously move away from cashless transactions through the UPI.
In the UPI mode of payment, say a Flipkart delivery boy comes home
with the item and uses the Flipkart service app on the tablet to
authenticate transaction (essentially the bank account linked to the
name of the person). If the command reads ‘charge Krishna210330@bank.com
Rs 30,000′, this message will appear on the PhonePe app or the Flipkart
app, where the PhonePe platform is integrated. The issuing and the
settlement bank will connect through the UPI and close the transaction.
The bank then sends a message on the app saying ‘Authenticate
transaction’, and when the consumer touches the icon ‘yes’the
transaction is complete. Under this scheme Flipkart has to figure out
how one authenticates a transaction when a third party receives
it.Perhaps the app should be able to rationalise GPS coordinates of the
delivery boy, and link it to the consumer. However, this is a simple
problem to solve, it is a question of adoption.
“There are several possibilities on our platform. But our platform is
built with the consumer in mind,” says Sameer Nigam, Co-founder of
PhonePe.
The market opportunity
The acquisition cost of PhonePe is unknown and sources say that it is
an all-stock deal of not more than $45 million, since the startup had
no clients or consumer downloads. But the number cannot be verified.
However, the 20-member technology team is going to be part of a new
journey for Flipkart in the payments space.
Acquisitions in this space have begun to hot up. Recently Momoe,
another consumer-to-merchant payment app, was acquired by ShopClues for
an undisclosed sum. Startups like FonePaisa are building an ecosystem of
banks and are offering their service to several merchants to settle
payments. They also believe that the consumer need not use several
payment apps to transact with merchants when they use FonePaisa.
“Consumers will be the beneficiaries in this ecosystem,” says Ritesh
Agarwal, Co-founder,FonePaisa.
The payments market in the country is $1 trillion in India according
to consulting firms like PwC and KPMG. The UPI is going to bring many
unbanked Indians into the banking ecosystem. The total number of bank
accounts in India is not more than 225 million and the country has a
credit card penetration of 17 million. Thereare at least 900 million
people who have no access to bank accounts. “India’s per capita income
is growing and payments through smartphones are going to be big
business. Payments for social services on smartphones by using the UID
number will bring transparency in the system,” says Nandan Nilekani,
Co-founder and former CEO of Infosys.
Snapdeal has Freecharge, there is PayTM and now Flipkart has PhonePe.
But between all of them PhonePe will make Flipkart the settlement house
for merchants and consumers. It is a far more holistic way of looking
at payments than cross-selling vouchers and small ticket items. If
PhonePe works then Flipkart would have pulled out a master stroke to
usher in a card-less and cashless urban India.
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