Aiming for 20-30 mn high-value customers, not 400 mn users: Flipkart super.money founder

Flipkart's super.money app is the new kid on the block looking to shake things up in an already competitive UPI space dominated by established players such as PhonePe, GooglePay and Paytm, enjoying a market share of 48%, 34% and 11%, respectively as of October 2023, according to a NPCI, (National Payments Corporation of India) report.

Collectively, these three platforms accounted for 94% of UPI transactions by volume and 96% by value in March 2023, as per the CAFRAL (Centre for Advanced Financial Research and Learning) India finance report. 

With this, Flipkart has become the second e-commerce brand to enter the UPI market. In 2019, the e-commerce giant Amazon launched its digital payments service, Amazon Pay, in India. According to various reports, it currently is the sixth-largest UPI platform in India.

With these heavyweights dominating the market, you’d think super.money might be intimidated. Not so. Instead, the app is embracing its underdog status— opting for a youthful, fun-loving image in the Indian UPI market.

“We believe there’s an opportunity to be a more youthful, fun brand in a market that is very utilitarian. Credit on UPI is still a relatively new phenomenon, and there’s a lot of room for innovation. We want to champion those use cases,” Prakash Sikaria, founder, super.money, says.

The app offers users several attractive features and benefits, like impressive cashback rewards and seamless bank integrations, and reportedly also plans to introduce a range of financial products, including a co-branded credit card, fixed deposits (FDs), and instant pre-approved personal loans, to meet the diverse financial needs of consumers.

Unlike its competitors, super.money is laser-focused on a specific consumer base: young, affluent, and tech-savvy individuals who are quick to adopt new trends and technologies.

“We don’t want 400 million users. We want 20-30 million high-value customers who are also creditworthy. These users are highly monetisable, and the lifetime value of this user base is very high." - Prakash Sikaria, founder, super.money.

The company is not only looking to grow on the back of UPI transactions, but also focusing on credit disbursements.

“In the short term, we want to grow our credit disbursement from $40-50 million per month to $100 million over the next six months. On the UPI side, we’re processing about a million transactions per day currently and aim to grow that by 4x in the same timeframe."

While super.money may be a child brand of Flipkart, the goal is to establish it as a standalone entity. However, Sikaria acknowledged that there will be a transitional phase in which the brand will leverage Flipkart’s trusted name selectively before evolving independently.

Disruptive debut campaign 

While other UPI apps have established strong partnerships with celebrities, its debut campaign features an unexpected mascot—a human-goat hybrid—delivering an important message about making money fun again. The unusual mascot is visually striking, memorable, and designed to stand out in a market where most payment brands feel "boring," as Sikaria puts it.

super.money aims to disrupt this space by its marketing as well as its offerings says the founder of super.money.

Flipkart's in-house brand team developed and executed the campaign. “When Shikha, our in-house creative consultant, came up with the human-goat hybrid concept, we loved it instantly. It was visually unique and quirky, but it also delivered the story we wanted to tell in a funny, relatable way,” he adds. 

The brand is doubling down on this quirky energy, gearing up for a massive influencer campaign featuring celebs like Hardik Pandya and Neha Kakkar, all set to launch during the festive season.

The ad film, dubbed the 'meh' film, pokes fun at the 'boring' rewards that UPI platforms typically offer, leaving users disappointed. Asked how the platform plans to fulfill the claims made in the campaign given its competitors have drastically reduced the size and quality of their rewards as they grew bigger, Sikria asserts that its business model is designed to serve consumers that way.

“The way our business model works is that we make a small, select target of a set of people who are either creditworthy or want to walk the path with our secured products. In lieu of that, because we are able to process them better, we can also monetise them better and can give them better rewards.” 

Moving away from traditional media

For any new brand that aims to be an established name, television, print, and OOH along with digital play a massive role. However, Sikaria explains that the team made a conscious decision to avoid traditional media altogether and focus solely on digital platforms and influencers.

“We set a challenge for ourselves to create a campaign without using traditional media, rethinking even digital channels like banner ads. The influencer economy is booming, and we wanted to see if we could make the entire campaign influencer-driven."

With festival season approaching, super.money is ramping up its digital efforts to reach consumers in a fresh way. The company’s focus is not just on driving transactions but also on building a brand story that consumers can relate to.