$2.5b a year. 18m unique users. This fintech startup wants to be India’s payment universe

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Consumers are a fickle bunch, especially on the internet. Money owed? I’ll pay you back using Chillr. Selling an old couch on OLX? Right into my Paytm wallet, please. Direct deposits to cover rent, credit cards when buying clothes in-store, e-wallets to pay for that taxi ride… it’s hard to figure out exactly how people like to pay.

To make things even worse, most people haven’t even gotten online yet. Figuring out the behavior of the elusive online customer is a daunting challenge – but it’s not one that scares CitrusPay.

“Every way in which a consumer wants to make a transaction, we want Citrus to power it,” says its managing director, Amrish Rau. “It can be chat-based, through a link, from a mobile phone, with a wallet… we’ll be there.”

It’s a five-year-old company with a simple goal: every time that anyone in India
transacts online, CitrusPay wants to be there.

It’s raised US$32.3 million to make this happen, with its latest being a series C round of US$25 million led by Sequoia and Ascent. This money gives it one important weapon: the freedom and flexibility to shift its shape to fit India’s fintech landscape.

Many roads

Photo credit: Daniele Marcucci.

There are many directions that fintech in India can go, and CitrusPay makes sure to be a part of as many of these as it can.

Here’s one possibility: Banks might become the go-to payment solution for India’s consumers. That means that anytime customers want to transact, they will pay directly from their bank accounts. There are several reasons that this might be the case, including the fact that millions of Indians already trust banks and are used to using them.

This is a scenario that CitrusPay has considered closely. Its first and foremost offering is its payment gateway. Merchants that use the gateway can provide an aggregate of all of India’s major banks to its customers, and let them choose when making a transaction.

What with improvements in the technology that banking sites are using, that’s a pretty useful option. There’s another angle to it, though.

The umbrella organization that runs most of the retail payments in the country, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), plans to launch a United Payments Interface (UPI) in April. Its technology will let people transfer money between banks and bank-to-mobile wallet with just a single identifier, like a phone number or an Aadhar number.

That sort of efficiency might help CitrusPay’s services become like Swish, an app launched by six different Swedish banks that was the impetus behind Sweden going nearly-cashless. It lets users transfer money in real-time between major banks with just a single click.

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