Fintech giant MobiKwik sees UPI as the next growth engine and is not concerned about the existing bigger players in the market, co-founder Upasana Taku said. business line in an interaction. Taku shares business guidance for the tax and recent events related to the company. Fragments:
How has your market share increased in the UPI segment?
We were among the fastest growing apps between April and September. We are too small in UPI and hence we can continue to grow at a very fast pace. In Q2 2025, we had completed 40 million transactions and in Q2 2026, there were 138 million UPI transactions that users performed with our app. In the March quarter, we had facilitated 77 million UPI transactions. The value of transactions has also doubled year on year. We are now quite focused on UPI as we are already number one in wallets and seventh in bill payments. We want to grow without cashback-led activities, but organically. We are targeting repeat customers, who will become high-frequency UPI users for us and provide us with good value for money.
We see people using our pocket UPI product. This is because not everyone in India has multiple bank accounts. In tier II and tier III cities, people have only one bank account. Every time you use the same bank account for a ₹20 transaction and ₹5000 transactions, you enter the same bank box where your savings are parked. If your average earning potential is less than ₹1 lakh per month, it is difficult for people to maintain two bank accounts with a minimum balance requirement. Therefore, from a financial security and fraud prevention perspective, it makes sense to have one bank account and put some savings in a wallet and conduct digital transactions from that wallet. This will ensure security, budgetary control, increased transaction success rate and fraud prevention.
How are you going to compete with established players?
Unlike other apps, I don’t have to recruit users. I already have many users on my app; I just have to make sure they start using the wallet on UPI too. Previously, they used wallet everywhere they saw paying with MobiKwik. Now we ask them to pay with our wallet at every QR. While UPI itself does not generate revenue, we can use it as a hook product to engage customers with our app and sell third-party financial services products to them.
You have said that you will become EBITDA positive in the third quarter. How do you want to achieve that and when do you expect to be profitable?
We have tried to improve every quarter in H1FY26. Even if I improve my EBITDA by ₹15 crore in Q3, I will have positive EBITDA as we are currently negative ₹6 crore. The driving forces behind the EBITDA growth would be higher sales growth, lower direct costs and a better contribution margin. Largely we present two businesses: payments and financial services.
In the payments sector, GMV has grown sharply by over 50 percent year-on-year to ₹43,000 crore in the second quarter. A year ago we achieved a gross margin of 19 percent in the payment activities, in the second quarter of 2026 we achieved a gross margin of 29 percent. On the credit side, we were struggling with all the macro factors related to unsecured loans in the last two to three quarters. Now we are trying to bring about recovery and we have reached a stage where the problems of the past have been resolved. Now our balance sheet has been normalized and the credit activities will start to grow. In terms of profit, we consider EBITDA as profit only. For investors in a young company like ours, their investment is focused on higher growth rather than dividends. But after a few quarters we will definitely become profitable.
Guidance with the onboarding of users and sellers?
We will easily add 3-4 million every quarter. In terms of number of merchants, we typically add 1 lakh merchants every quarter.
MobiKwik has filed a lawsuit against the investment banker for non-payment of dues to suppliers involved in the company’s IPO process. Has that issue been resolved?
During the IPO process, you appoint a large number of lawyers, investment banks, printers and multiple agencies and a contract is signed with each of these parties. The total cost of all these contracts is already stated in the DRHP. So when the IPO is completed, all the proceeds go into an escrow account and a portion of that account goes to pay all the agencies hired. But in order to pay from that account, the custodians of that account, who are all investment bankers, must give permission.
In our case we had two investment banks. So the problem was that one of the banks themselves, Dam Capital, did not approve the payouts because they wanted their own payout first. There was a dispute between the two commercial banks regarding the payout of Dam Capital and due to that dispute, the banks withheld ₹42 crore, which was earmarked for payouts to all vendors. We wanted to pay suppliers, we chased them from December last year and we asked that they could keep the part of the investment banker payout in the escrow account but release the fees from other suppliers. They didn’t agree and used it as a bullying tactic, so we finally filed a case against them in the Delhi High Court and within one hearing we got the bail and they were forced to release money to all the suppliers. We have gone to court to pay sellers.
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