27 Aug Navi plans to push ahead with credit on UPI: CEO Rajiv Naresh
“We are set to clock 500 million UPI payments this month. Each of our customers undertakes around 20-30 transactions per month,” he told ET.
While Naresh did not disclose the exact number of UPI users with Navi, the app is estimated to have 15-16 million active users.
Navi launched UPI payments in 2023 and quickly scaled up the business. In July 2024, it recorded around 68 million UPI payments.
Navi was one of the first fintech startups to launch a credit line on UPI, in partnership with Karnataka Bank. Naresh said that while the product is live, it has yet to scale up given it’s still early days.
ET reported on August 18 that some of the commercial banks are warming up to the credit product on UPI and are looking at fintechs to start testing credit lines, but overall it has not had a sharp uptick. Bankers are still figuring out some of the product flows such as reporting to credit information companies and interest-free period, according to industry insiders.
With payments, lending, insurance and mutual funds, Navi wants to go public eventually as a full-stack financial services platform but has not committed to a definite timeline yet. In September 2022, the company had received the Securities and Exchange Board of India nod for a Rs 3,350 crore initial public offering, but it did not go through with the listing process then.
Navi was launched as a fintech platform in 2020 by Sachin Bansal, after his first venture, Flipkart, got acquired by Walmart. In February this year, Bansal moved into an executive chairman role, appointing Naresh as the CEO of Navi (previously Navi Technologies) and Abhishek Dwivedi as the CEO of the non-banking financial company arm, Navi Finserv.
“It (credit line on UPI) is a cheaper way to issue credit. Unlike a credit card, the operational costs are lower. Just the physical card itself costs money with UPI, those costs don’t exist,” Naresh said.
While Navi has managed to scale up payments and lending, growth in the insurance business has been hard to come by. According to data from the General Insurance Council, Navi reported gross direct premium collection of Rs 41 crore between April and July. The company got into this business by acquiring DHFL General Insurance in 2020.
Having recently launched motor insurance, Naresh said that he wants to double down on a direct-to-consumer (D2C) strategy for the insurance play. This will put Navi in direct competition with Acko, the only other major D2C general insurance company in the country.
On the asset management side, Navi acquired Essel Mutual Fund in February 2021. The company has built passive investment funds, international investments and debt investments as well.
From around Rs 8,500 crore of assets under management currently, Naresh wants to scale it up ten times through a focused strategy around passive mutual fund business.
Lending, the mainstay of the group, is back in full force after the central bank withdrew business restrictions on the firm in December 2024. A rating document issued by Crisil in December last year showed that Navi had reduced its personal loan interest rates to 26% from 35%.
Navi offers unsecured personal loans and home loans currently. While the company does not have any immediate plans to launch other secured lending products, it wants to expand its home loan business.
“Home loan is still relatively smaller than our personal loan business, of course, but we are going to invest a lot of time and effort in doing that (home loans), zoning in on the target segment we want to go after, focusing on the customer journey a lot,” Naresh said.
According to filings seen by ET, Navi Finserv closed 2024-25 with an operating revenue of Rs 2,271 crore and a net profit of Rs 222 crore.