New Delhi Fintech startup Slice is rolling out UPI payments for its users as it wants to be a payments product company before being a credit-only company.
The UPI payment facility will be available for a waiting list of 10 million customers who are yet to access credit and millions of its existing customers, Slice founder and CEO Rajan Bajaj told VC Circle in an interaction.
“What we have done with UPI is by having an exclusive club that is Slice, we have built it into an open platform that anyone with a smartphone can access,” he said.
Slice, which started as a Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) product in 2016 and rolled out to a card product in 2019, enters a crowded UPI payments market where the likes of Walmart-backed PhonePe and Google Pay has already established itself. But a proposed rule by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which operates the popular UPI payment infrastructure, to cap single payment app processes and provide room for more companies to participate in the market.
Slice powered by GaragePreneurs Internet Pvt Ltd. Bajaj said the Ltd. will also launch other payment products such as NFC (near-field communication) in the coming years, which utilize the free cash flow generated from its credit product.
A person familiar with Slice said the startup is on more than The Gross Transaction Value (GTV) of 2000 crores allows the company to enjoy economies of scale due to it.
Bajaj did not comment on its GTV, but said that at the company level, it is close to achieving profitability without further expansion in the coming months. Its non-banking financial company (NBFC) arm, Quadrillion Finance, has been profitable for the past two years, he said.
Bajaj also did not comment on reports of a possible new Series C funding round. Led by New York-based investment firm Tiger Global and Insight Partners, Slice has talked of a new funding round just months after it raised $220 million as part of its latest Series B fundraise. This round also made it to the famous Unicorn Club. A unicorn is a privately held startup with a valuation of at least $1 billion.
Bajaj said Slice is well-capitalised, noting that overall investors do not view China as aggressively as before and interest rates are higher in the US. “Therefore, India remains a strong destination both in equity and capital markets and we do not see this going to stop, although investors are cautious,” he said.
Slice will continue to focus on the domestic markets for the next few years as there is ample potential to tap into the tech-savvy Millennials and Gen Z segments.
“We aim to be the best payments company globally with over 100 million customers in the next 3-4 years,” Bajaj said.
He also said that Slice does not want to lay off any of its employees and will continue to do so.
In the past, startups like Vedantu and Meesho, which raised significant funding last year and became unicorns, have announced layoffs in recent months.