LazyPay has been one of the front-line players in the short credit, pay later industry. A product of payment gateway provider PayU Finance, LazyPay is now looking to diversify its offerings with myriad services such as personal loans, and of late, UPI-based instant EMIs at online and offline stores. It is this that Pallav Jain, country head of PayU Finance, believes will fuel the next growth phase for the product that is still primarily known for its pay later service.
Jain believes that while UPI has clearly grown exponentially, adding LazyPay’s user experience design and interface to it would make digital payments even more convenient, particularly in offline stores. This, he believes, will help the service expand into Tier II cities and beyond. Speaking to News18, Jain said, "The next expansion phase for LazyPay is to provide customers with the seamless, minimal-click user experience on other payment merchants, such as UPI. Today, a user can walk into a store such as Croma Retail, select a product, scan the UPI QR code through LazyPay, select the desired instalment of payment, and that’s that. This is far superior in terms of the user experience at offline merchants, which typically involves paperwork, processing time, and so on."
Jain says that going forward, PayU will be expanding the rollout of its UPI-based EMI option to more users, which is right now restricted to a select few. The reason for this is to reduce the risk of users not paying back. To do this, Jain states that PayU has its proprietary, in-house algorithms that read into a customer’s spending and paying patterns in order to gauge a lifestyle score of sorts, while also tapping into CIBIL data in case of higher credit disbursals such as personal loans.
"Non-payment of dues is a risk that we definitely run, and so does any credit line business, anywhere. But, in terms of delinquency, our ratios (of non-payments) are far lower than any other non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) in India. In most cases, it is about the user forgetting to pay, and not willful. But, our comfort around delinquency is what led us to expand the product further," said Jain.
With UPI-based payments in LazyPay’s interface, Jain believes that this is an ideal combination that even non-tech savvy users would adopt. He says, "The penetration of the internet and online transactions have significantly increased, which is bringing users online from Tier II towns and beyond, and from even higher age groups. We want to appeal to them by making cashless transactions as convenient and seamless as possible, and save them the hassle of paperwork when making large payments."
These are the target areas that Jain hopes will help take LazyPay beyond its pay later service. The UPI-based instant loans can now be availed by eligible users at select partner merchants, which Jain says PayU is already working to expand further.
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