‘Doubling down on UPI, will launch UPI on RuPay credit cards soon’

financialexpress.com:

Payments space major Amazon Pay will double down on the use cases of Unified Payments Interface and and will soon introduce an option to link RuPay credit cards to Amazon Pay UPI, Whole-Time Director Vikas Bansal said. In a conversation with Piyush Shukla and Siddhant Mishra, Bansal says there is a lot of scope for buy now-pay later (BNPL) model for “serious” players in the space. Edited excerpts:

Can you elaborate on banking partnerships for pay later product?

Today we have a large portfolio of instalments for merchants. If the customer wants to use instalments, we provide all credit in the ecosystem for them to use. What makes this interesting is customers can pay zero interest instalments. That works extremely well. Today almost two-thirds or more instalments or more are zero interest instalments. We work with almost every bank and non-bank in the country who offers instalments…we have more than 8 million users who are using that product. We also do some work on the B2B side. We have our Amazon business where customers can use the pay later product…and we also do work on seller side where an Amazon seller can get financing.

Is BNPL a sustainable product in long term, given the stringent regulatory norms?

Absolutely, because India is very under-penetrated on credit. Risk and compliance is the cost of doing business in the financial services sector. Serious players recognise that customer-friendly offerings may come with a high level of governance and cybersecurity norms. Banks and fintechs globally have shown business models can be sustainable even with high levels of compliance. There are enough revenue pools nowadays. BNPL facilitators and banks both stand to make money. Unlike UPI transactions, which were free, I