Sachin Bansal's Navi overtakes Cred as fourth largest UPI player
19 Nov 2024, 12:58 AMFlipkart Group’s UPI app super.money also witnessed surge in its number of transactions in October to 50 million.
Arti Singh
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Sachin Bansal's Navi overtook Cred to become the fourth largest UPI app in the country in October month, behind PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm.
Navi app grew 31% month-on-month, registering 158 million transactions in October, up from 120 million in September, according to National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). Whereas, the Kunal Shah-led Cred saw its transactions grow to 152 million in October from 140 million in September.
Flipkart Group’s UPI app super.money also witnessed surge in its number of transactions in October to 50 million.
PhonePe continued its leadership position with 48% market share in terms of volume of UPI transactions. Google Pay remained second most used UPI app with 37% share, while Paytm is a distant third at 7%.
Last month, Paytm received the Reserve Bank of India's nod to resume onboarding new users onto its UPI platform, following an almost 10-month ban. It will be interesting to see how quickly Paytm regains its lost ground in the UPI payments space.
On the other hand, last month the RBI barred Sachin Bansal-owned Navi Finserv, and three other NBFCs (non-banking financial institutions) to stop disbursing loans. The central bank said that over the last few months it has been sensitising its regulated entities through various channels on the need to use their regulatory freedom responsibly and ensure fair, reasonable and transparent pricing, especially for small value loans.
NPCI has been facing difficulty to implement volume cap for UPI players. The UPI volume cap, announced in November 2020 with the aim of addressing concentration risk, gave existing players two years to comply — a timeline that evidently didn't work out. In December 2022, it announced the extension of deadline for UPI players to limit to a market cap of 30% to December 31, 2024.
"It will take at least 3-4 years," a top payments official had then told.
The Head and Tale exclusively reported that NPCI has been pinning its hopes on newer players. “It is difficult to find a new set of players who will accelerate the next phase of growth. However, in the last couple of months, the situation has been improving with players like Sachin Bansal-led Navi," the official also added.
In order to lower concentration risk, NPCI recently also spun off its BHIM app as a separate company to aggressively grow the market share. It also appointed Lalitha Nataraj as its chief executive officer.
The author is Founder and Editor of The Head and Tale. She can be reached at
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