The Mumbai based start-up in the digital wallet industry Citrus Pay has raised funds of $25 million (approx. Rs 167 crore) in October this year. The company has entered into partnerships with Visa, RuPay and a slew of other initiatives in order to expand its business that belongs to the payments space.
Though Citrus Pay applied for a payments bank license, the start-up did not get it. Citrus Pay is trying to lure the users of RuPay from the small towns and cities to its transaction platform. RuPay is an Indian card scheme that was launched by the National Payments Corporation of India.
Regarding this, Jitendra Gupta, the Managing Director at Citrus Pay stated that they are planning to augment their present wallet user base of 10 million to 12 million in the next 60 to 90 days. The company aims to do this by accepting the Rupay cards.
As of now, the wallet users from the small towns and cities account to less than one fifth of the user base of Citrus Pay. The company is trying to expand its footprint in these regions as it wants to foray into its second phase of growth. It is hopes to partner to achieve the same as RuPay has most customers in such places.
Gupta stated that they are providing an incentive of 10 percent cashback for those RuPay card users who use the wallet of Citrus Pay for the first time. This will be beneficial for their merchant partners as well, he added.
In order to increase the acceptance of its wallet across the merchant desks, Cirtus Pay has partnered with Visa so that it can launch a prepaid card of its own. The card can be linked to the mobile wallet and also used for the transactions if Visa cards are accepted.
By early 2016, they will introduce a prepaid card along with Visa, but the partner bank is yet to be finalized, added Gupta. As the wallet space is cluttered and highly competitive, Citrus wallet’s 8,000 merchant partners will provide discounts in January across all purchases made through it.
