Groww rolling out UPI payments via ‘Pay’ feature

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Groww, which has been looking to expand its financial services offerings, has started offering a payments feature to users on its broking app. The platform is using the unified payments interface (UPI) infrastructure and allows users to make peer-to-peer payments as well as payments to merchants through scanning their QR codes. ET has reviewed the feature that has been rolled out to users over the past few days.

With its payments app, the company is also focusing on the bill payment services: allowing users to make loan and credit card repayments, pay electricity and water bills as well recharge DTH among other options. Groww is a third-party payment app on UPI, which is operated by National Payments Corporation of India. It has onboarded a number of billers on the app through the Bharat Bill Payment System platform.

Earlier this year, the company started offering instant personal loans on its platform, providing credit up to Rs 5 lakh for a tenure of three months to five years, after it secured a licence to operate as a non-banking finance company (NBFC). It also has received an in-principle approval from the Reserve Bank of India for a payment aggregator licence. ET had written on May 31 that stock broking platforms such as Groww were eyeing opportunities across credit and payments.

Until last year, Groww, which was last valued at $3 billion, had aspirations to turn into a neo-banking platform and was looking to partner with Federal Bank, media reports suggested. The idea was to offer saving bank accounts to users along with cards. However, it abandoned those plans and chose to build its financial services offerings ground up, through credit and payments.Why the move? Owing to the cyclical nature, stock investment