Kwikening the Pace
After six years of sizing
up the digital payments and mobile wallet market, MobiKwik is set to shift into
higher gear
In the age of 12 and
18-month-old startups raising millions of dollars from venture capital
investors and boasting about ambitious growth plans, Mo biKwik comes across as
the ponderous senior citizen. For one, the company was founded back in 2009
(many founders were yet in college then); for another, it hasn't been in a
hurry to build an explosively growing startup. Instead, the founders of
MobiKwik have brought the business to a slow boil, spending this time figuring
out the digital payments and mobile wallets market and only raising their
second round of funding in 2015, a good six years after getting off the ground.
Although the founders have
only been sipping at their funding to drive growth, MobiKwik has some
impressive numbers to offer sceptics. Today it has 25 million users and
processes half a million transactions a day, across 50,000 merchants, with its
mobile wallet. “People are using their mobile phones more than they use their
cards and other electronic forms of payment,“ says founder Bipin Preet Singh.
India today has some six
million credit card and some 40 million debit card holders -for a population of
over a billion that's a tiny figure, according to Singh. He points out that
there are some 200 million smartphone us ers in India, all of whom are poten
tial MobiKwik users. While mobile wallet-based payments started with recharge
for mobile services and DTH television and then graduated more recently to
ecommerce, the next step will involve pushing offline companies to accept
mobile wallets. Already, MobiKwik is pushing ahead with this plan, with
companies such as Big Bazaar (which gets about 2% of its overall business from
MobiKwik payments), Café Coffee Day, Sagar Ratna and WH Smith among a
fastgrowing list of merchants accepting this form of payment.“We want to reach
a stage where you step out of home and should be able to pay anywhere for
anything...you shouldn't need to carry cash or cards to pay the local grocer,
taxi and any other product or service,“ says Singh.
While MobiKwik may have
been off to a slow start (Singh prefers to call it measured), it has gathered
strong momentum in the past 12 to 18 months. For example, it had barely eight
million users 12 months ago processed some 2,00,000 transactions and most
tellingly had fewer than 4,000 merchants signed up. As companies have become
more confident with MobiKwik's mobile wallet, they have eagerly signed on, with
the promise of both quicker payments and to distance themselves from handling
cash transactions.“Once we have people's trust, we can think of what we can do
beyond our core business of mobile wallets,“ says Singh. “We want to make
everything seamless for consumers...we want them to be able to manage their
money without logging into bank accounts or signing a piece of paper,“ Singh claims.
For the moment, MobiKwik wants to cross $1 billion in gross mer chandise volume
(GMV) in the next six to nine months and simultaneously unveil its plans to
become a broader pro vider of financial services products -on the mobile phone.
With another $100 million
round of funding in t
ETM3JAN16
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