PayU aims to provide full-stack financial services to its customers

 So far, the company has disbursed about $300 million in credit and it now wants to add new products

PayU Finance, a digital lending player backed by Prosus Ventures, has seen its buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) segment double in a year and touch a consumer base of 3 million. The firm, which has seen its lending business touch 70 per cent of pre-Covid levels, is now aiming to provide full-stack financial services to its customers.

Prashanth Ranganathan, chief executive officer (CEO), PayU Finance, believes that in the next five years, the company will be able to create a loan book of $1.5 billion — combined between LazyPay and PaySense, making it one of the largest digital lenders in the country.“ Over the last year, one of the significant transformations has been that we have managed to bring credit to consumers. We are now systematically looking at bringing more end-to-end digital services to them. LazyPay has 3 million users, and now, we want to offer other financial services like saving, insurance, and wealth management, among others, to this segment. So, starting from BNPL to full-stack financial services, that’s how we see ourselves,” said Ranganathan.

BNPL’s offering that it launched in 2017 saw a huge adoption during Covid as it allowed users to make use of deferred payment mechanisms for small-ticket buys in the range of Rs 300-500. The success of this has also propelled the company to offer this mechanism for large-ticket transactions.

“Within BNPL or LazyPay, we have two segments or avatars. The first is a deferred payment product that caters to small-ticket transactions, and it is all about convenient payment. It is not about giving credit. Something similar to a UPI or wallet. We have seen this growing phenomenally for us,” added Ranganathan.