MobiKwik thrives on targeting Bharat, witnesses 2X jump in revenue growth in FY19

MobiKwik’s annual report for FY19 says it’s building financial services for Bharat. The angle here, as elaborated by Founder and CEO Bipin Preet Singh in a blog post, is to not count on the unbanked, but the underbanked users.

What is this underbanked user? These are the 750 million banks accounts out of the total 900 million that are enrolled in Public Sector Unit (PSU) banks where the account holders are mostly from lower middle class. Why? Because they have access to lesser quality tech assistance, wealth management and other financial services provided by PSUs.

And Mobikwik within the last very year has gone from being an e-wallet to a horizontal fintech platform with launch of services like UPI, credit card payment, loans and credit line, insurance, mutual funds, digital gold investment, and instant redemption of mutual funds.

All we had wondered at the launch of these services was how much dent it would create in the market, or in the company’s performance. Seems like we’ve got our surface answers in the least.

MobiScore - the company’s indigenous credit score based on AI algorithms, saw 64 million users consenting to sharing the data required to generate a score and loans were disbursed in a completely digital manner with sizes ranging between Rs 2,000 to Rs 2 lakhs.

May 2019 saw MobiKwik giving away 70,000 loans and claims are being made that 1 lakh applications are received every month. Almost Rs 1,500 crore worth loans have been distributed to about 1.2 million customers in FY20 but just 3.5 lakh loans in FY19 with a $24 million loan book so far.

Apparently, credit scoring and loan disbursement made for a customer more loyal than a regular one.

Insurance numbers, however, remain yet to be disclosed. The deadline of the aim announced at the time of flaunch last year - to complete 15 lakh loans by end of FY19 - now seems to have been extended to end of 2019. For Bharat, these policies - accident and/or term - are cheap with prices as low assas Rs s20 giving a cover of Rs 1 lakh.

Wealth Management is all about helping the Bharat achieve their financial goals and manage their funds in a better way than savings at a low of cost of Rs 100, for which the company had acquired ClearFunds and launched KwikSave.

But what about that B2B business Magic? No idea.

This Nobelesse Oblige agenda has somehow stabilized the overall revenue growth rate of the company to 2X year-on-year taking the Rs 86.5 crore figure in FY18 to Rs 186.4 crore mark in FY19.

At the same time, claims illustrate that the company’s Contribution margin - Revenue apart from banking cost and marketing services - has gone up. And “in the right way” by increasing revenue.

But there is still no light being thrown on expenses, that could go on to postulate the true nature of this growth achieved by MobiKwik.

All there is, is the hype around MobiKwik being the second most preferred application for merchant payments and wallet to bank fund transfers (Umm? Hello Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay), the 4th largest bill payments platform and some numbers key figures.

The monthly active user (MAU) count has reportedly increased by 90% with 40 million users in a year, 11% of overall UPI handles in India being issued under MobiKwik, and $3 billion in total payment volume under payment gateway (by how many of those 40 million people?).

It looks like a great picture on surface, but there are still a lot of grey areas to be explored most important one being how much of this penetration has actually been into the target market - Bharat?

Blog: MobiKwik FY19