India’s free digital payments revolution has upended how money moves — but not how fintechs make it. Now, Flipkart’s fintech arm Super.money is partnering with Kotak811, the digital offering of one of India’s top commercial banks, Kotak Mahindra Bank, to change that, bundling UPI payments, savings, and secured credit into a single account aimed at turning usage into profit.
The partnership aims to issue about 2 million secured credit cards in the next 12 months — roughly 60 percent to first-time borrowers — and 5 million within 2 years. Super.money, which already serves 10 million active users, expects the Kotak alliance to contribute around 10 percent of its revenue next year as it works toward profitability by 2026, chief executive Prakash Sikaria said in an interview.
India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), backed by the Indian government, has made instant bank transfers free and ubiquitous, processing more than 19 billion transactions a month. That success, though, has left little room for fintechs to profit, since regulators, including the Indian finance ministry, do not allow the merchant fees that typically fund rewards and credit programs. Super.money’s bet — using a secured card and savings account to reintroduce incentives — offers a template for building viable business models atop no-fee payment systems.
“We do UPI not to solve the pure payment use case,” Sikaria told TechCrunch. “We do UPI to build an interesting cross-financial services play where we are acquiring and retaining customers with the UPI.”
Launched in June 2024 as Walmart-owned Flipkart’s latest fintech venture after spinning off PhonePe in late 2022, Super.money is already generating about $3 million in monthly revenue, with an annualized run rate of roughly $36 million, the executive said.
The fintech app has emerged as one of India’s top five UPI platforms in recent months, processing more than 200 million transactions a month for four straight months through August, per the National Payments Corporation of …