Flipkart fintech super.money preps buy-now-pay-later play
Super.money, backed by Flipkart, is entering the buy now, pay later (BNPL) market by partnering with banks and lenders, aiming to enhance its e-commerce and lending services. The app processed ₹740 crore in loans last month and is targeting 2 million credit cards by next year.
Flipkart-backed UPI app super.money is preparing a fresh push into buy now, pay later (BNPL) by partnering regulated banks and lenders, as it hunts for its next leg of growth beyond credit on UPI, according to two people aware of the plans.
The company is looking to compete with existing checkout-finance players such as Axio and Snapmint in the tightly contested intersection of e-commerce and lending, said the first person, asking not to be named as the product is still under development.
“Once it is fully built, the launch will have two parts," this person added. “One is to offer super.money as a checkout option on e-commerce sites, and the other is to bring an e-commerce layer inside the app itself with BNPL-style financing at checkout."
The second person said the broader idea is to position super.money as a one-stop destination for e-commerce journeys supported by credit, so that users can move from discovery to payment in a single, smooth flow on its interface.
Mint could not independently ascertain a firm timeline for the launch. However, the two people cited above said the BNPL product is currently in development and testing, and is expected to go live only after the company completes tighter KYC and other regulatory checks that apply to this category.
This emerging category, where BNPL is offered as a checkout option across commerce sites, is not new. Companies such as Snapmint, which raised about $125 million this year, and Axio, acquired by Amazon for around $200 million, are already significant players in this space.
According to Brijesh Damodaran, managing partner at Auxano Capital, a BNPL offering allows a UPI app to move beyond being just another payments button at checkout granting it greater control over the merchant interface with features such as EMI options, offers, and seamless pay-later flows.
“UPI has won on volume but not on margins. But it carries zero MDR (merchant discount rate) and is heavily commoditised. BNPL or checkout credit lets a UPI app move from pure payments to credit-led revenue through interest, fees, or merchant commission," he said. MDR is the fee merchants pay to payment processors for accepting digital payments; UPI transactions have had a zero MDR regime since 2020, meaning payment apps earn no direct revenue from flows.
Within the broader consumer credit landscape, BNPL is expected to grow at a robust clip of 20–35% annually over the next several years, though the big question is whether large banks, traditional card issuers, or UPI-first players like super.money will end up controlling most of the market at checkout, Damodaran added.
Business basics
A spokesperson for super.money declined to comment on the new BNPL plans. However, founder Prakash Sikaria told Mint that the app had processed “around ₹740 crore of loans" last month alone through its various credit products.
Apart from loans, super.money also works with a clutch of banks, including Axis Bank (for a co-branded credit card and secured cards), Utkarsh Small Finance Bank (secured credit cards and fixed deposits) and Kotak811 (secured cards and an integrated savings–spending–borrowing account).
“Next year, our projection is 2 million cards. We are already among the top three issuers of RuPay cards and we want to be the largest," Sikaria said.
Flipkart launched super.money beta version in June 2024 and rolled it out publicly in August that year. Since then, the app has doubled down on young, often first-time borrowers as its core market.
To acquire these users, super.money leaned on a rewards-led model that offers up to 5% cashback on every UPI transaction. The strategy appears to have paid off: by September 2025, the app had climbed into the top bracket of UPI players by transaction volume, overtaking established names such as CRED, Amazon Pay, WhatsApp Pay and BHIM.
In September, super.money processed 256.34 million UPI transactions worth ₹9,852.44 crore, even as PhonePe and Google Pay continued to command 80–83% of the overall market, down from about 85% a year earlier.
On whether such heavy cashback-led acquisition is sustainable, Sikaria said the average annual cashback per user is roughly $2–3. “Our thesis is we just need to monetize $2–3 more per user than our competition," he said. “India has a wide diversity of users; typically, monetisable users subsidise non-monetisable ones. If you can largely avoid non-monetizable users and focus on a high-Arpu (average revenue per user) segment, your average Arpu is much higher."
Elaborating on secured credit products, Sikaria said that super.money sees average monthly spends of about ₹5,000–6,000 per secured card user, largely led by merchant payments.
The app now has roughly 10.0–10.5 million monthly transacting users. On the revenue side, Sikaria said super.money is making about $3 million a month, which works out to an annualized revenue run rate of around $36 million at present.
Flipkart’s renewed fintech bet with super.money marks its second coming in payments and lending after its PhonePe chapter. The e-commerce major bought PhonePe in 2016, but the two separated ownership in December 2022, paving the way for both to raise capital and scale on their own, with Walmart continuing as the common majority shareholder.
Since then, PhonePe, led by Sameer Nigam, has filed draft papers with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) for an initial public offering of around ₹11,000 crore and seen large secondary share sales, including General Atlantic’s $600-million deal that helped employees cover tax outgo on exercised stock options.
Regulatory lens
The BNPL segment has drawn scrutiny from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in recent years, especially around low-ticket unsecured lending, deferred payment products routed via prepaid instruments, and opaque pricing for borrowers. The RBI has tightened norms on digital lending and pushed lenders to hold more capital against unsecured retail portfolios.
In 2023, the RBI also tightened rules around first-loss default guarantees (FLDGs), a popular comfort structure used by fintechs with their NBFC partners, where the fintech promises to cover part of the lender’s credit losses.
The central bank capped such guarantees at 5% of the outstanding loan pool, after earlier market practice in some unsecured digital lending segments had reportedly gone much higher. That pushed several lending service providers to pause or redesign short-duration, small-ticket credit products as their NBFC partners reworked risk, capital and economics under the new cap.
The BNPL landscape
The UPI and BNPL market has filled up with rivals such as Navi (founded by Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal), MobiKwik, Paytm, Amazon Pay and Google Pay. In BNPL specifically, super.money’s planned products would sit alongside Snapmint and Axio, as well as captive “pay later" offerings such as Amazon Pay Later and Flipkart Pay Later, plus horizontal BNPL specialists like Simpl and LazyPay (owned by PayU).
The BNPL industry in India has witnessed turbulence over the last few years, especially after high-profile setbacks like the shuttering of ZestMoney. Once a poster child for digital lending, ZestMoney ceased operations in December 2023 amid mounting non-performing assets and regulatory pressure, before parts of its loan book and technology platform were sold to DMI Finance, an NBFC lender.
Layoffs and restructuring followed, and similar pressures have also hit rivals. Simpl, another leading checkout credit provider, has reportedly trimmed its workforce in October this year and faced regulatory heat, including enforcement action from the Enforcement Directorate this year.
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