What PayU India plans to do with its wallet business, Citrus
Reports last week said PayU India was looking to consolidate its wallet business. CEO Amrish Rau today clarified that the company was not closing its wallet business entirely, as had been interpreted.
He explained that over the course of its operations in India, PayU India had different wallet licenses to its name. The first was in partnership with RBL Bank. PayU had earlier partnered with RBL Bank to launch a prepaid offering in India, and help the ancillary service. The co-branded wallet license was in the name of RBL Bank.
PayU holds the second licence in its own name. During the acquisition of Citrus Pay in September 2016, the company had surrendered the license that Citrus Pay owned.
PayU plans to shut its PayUMoney wallet which was co-branded with RBL Bank, by January 31, 2018, while still operating the wallet on its own name, and renaming its consumer wallet service to Citrus.
The company said in a comment,
"As part of this strategy, we will continue to run the wallet business with Citrus Wallet, which runs on PayU's own license granted by RBI. We will be terminating PayUmoney's wallet, which is in partnership with RBL Bank. As part of the consolidation of our business, instead of operating two wallets, we have plans to focus our synergies on Citrus wallet and drive higher customer efficacy towards it."
Amrish added,
“RBL is a separate entity, we couldn’t directly ask them to turn away. However, we are giving customers an option, if they want to continue with RBL wallet or migrate (to Citrus).”
He added that as a merchant payments company, PayU wouldn’t want their merchant partners to get further confused with multiple offerings of the same kind. Even the Reserve Bank of India restricts entities from holding more than one wallet licence at a time.
“We have already sent out information on what we are doing to the consumers and businesses, and giving them the choice. From our point of view, this is just a branding exercise more than anything,” Amrish said.
Citrus' wallet plans
According to the company, only two percent of the overall business for the firm comes through consumer payments. On the other hand, PayU’s solutions for Enterprise and SMB contribute to close to 80 percent and 20 percent of the firm, respectively.
So, in such a scenario PayU’s wallet strategy doesn’t seem to be changing much for the company, Amrish reiterates,
“We are keeping the wallet for any refund related services which our merchants might have.”
The company again clarified that with shutting the PayUMoney wallet, there would be no impact on the PayUMoney payment gateway.
What’s next?
At present, PayU’s payment gateway services see monthly volume of $1.2 billion every month transacted on the platform. Apart from the wallet business, Citrus, another active consumer play which PayU seems to be betting on is its credit offering, LazyPay.
Still in the nascent stage, the company sees close to 5,000 daily transactions and plans to invest close to $50 million in marketing and product development of LazyPay over the next couple of years.
By mid-2018, the company also plans to move to higher ticket EMI products and be present at used cases such as healthcare, Consumer discretionary, and home furniture, among others.
