Amazon Pay aims to be at the top in payment aggregator space, says Vikas Bansal

livemint.com:

Mint, Bansal talks about Amazon Pay’s payments and credit (BNPL) strategies; why the company is less aggressive in the offline payments space where the likes of Paytm, Google Pay, PhonePe invest heavily; and voice-enabled technology. Edited excerpts: If you go back 2013 to 2015 even before the UPI was born, when we set up shop, our focus was to just simplify payments for our shopping and improve our success rates; and, then see how we can extend credit by working with the ecosystem. Once we started to get a lot of success, we thought can we now take this experience to other merchants outside of Amazon and that's how online merchant and offline merchant payments were born.

And, then we started looking for other use cases. Amazon Pay is a differentiated payment experience, for our customers to pay on Amazon or off Amazon. It's still very early days for the ecosystem as well as for us.

We've hardly scratched the surface. When we started, we were at 10-15% digital payments penetration rate. As per the RBI data, today it’s anywhere between 30-40%.

But Sweden is 95%, and the US is between 80-90%. I don't think when it comes to payments, we are still there. Credit penetration is 3-4%.

But people who can be extended credit to, let's say of 400-500 million people, our number is less than 50 million as an industry. The opportunity is similar with insurance and wealth management. And that's how we feel like our competition is not really the other payment companies or credit companies, our competition is really cash.

I think it's a bit of both. We genuinely look at customer problems and look at a way how we can differentiate our offerings. We spend a lot of time in iterating what we have, we do a lot of work on design and customer