Exclusive: Swiggy to debut in payments with consumer wallet and UPI

Swiggy has unarguably been one of the two largest tech-enabled transactional platforms in India along with Ola (excluding payments). The common reason between the duo - is evident - horizontal aspirations.

Ola is eyeing several points of passengers transportation space while Swiggy is moving in the same direction in the hyperlocal delivery segment.

The Naspers-backed firm does food delivery with other logistics tasks - fetching anything from supermarket via Swiggy Stores and regular retailers. It also launched Swiggy Go, a parcel moving service akin to dunzo for moving documents and other forms of parcels locally.

What’s not common between the two companies? Payments. Ola has a wallet and while Swiggy doesn’t. According to three Entrackr’s sources, Swiggy is ramping up for a consumer-facing wallet as well as UPI.

“Swiggy has been working on launching its payment product for the past several months. The primary driver for having in-house payments is the growing scale with high repeat usages,” said two sources aware with the company’s plan on the condition of anonymity. 

Entrackr couldn’t ascertain whether Swiggy has applied for PPI licence with regulators or not. It’s worth noting that Swiggy had already registered a virtual payment address (VPA) with handle @swiggy on UPI in partnership with ICICI bank. 

So far, it was only used internally to pay delivery partners and critical associates/vendors. Our detailed queries to Swiggy remain unanswered. We will update the post as and when it responds.

“Besides wallet, Swiggy will also bundle UPI option in its payments play. The product is at least three-to-four months away from the official launch,” added sources mentioned above. A year ago, its arch-rival Zomato was also planning to launch its payments service. 

However, the Alipay-backed firm is yet to launch an in-house payments product. 

Swiggy would be joining the likes of Amazon Pay that has turned into a regular UPI-based app. Like Paytm and Google Pay, it supports person to merchant and person to person payments. “Similar to Amazon Pay, the Swiggy will be integrating payments feature into the native-app. It won’t be a separate app like PhonePe,” emphasised sources.

Swiggy is taking a leaf out of Go-Jek and playbook. “After Catering to several use cases - cabs, bikes, food delivery, among others, Go-Jek launched its own payments app Go-Pay. Similarly, Swiggy urged to have in-house payments product, especially, after Supr, Swiggy Stores and Go,” said sources.

For the uninitiated, Supr is a portfolio company of Swiggy. It was acquired by the Bengaluru-based firm in the late last year. Entrackr had exclusively reported about Supr acquisition by the Sriharsha Majety-led venture and Swiggy Go separately.

To drive adoption, Swiggy will be incentivising users for opting its in-house payments product. Just like Amazon does with Amazon Pay.

Swiggy’s debut in the digital payments space with its in-house product would be exciting to watch out for. Not all attempts in payments by large companies fructified. For instance, Snapdeal tried it with Freecharge, a move which later backfired.