UPI apps, wallets and neobanks

The phone as a bank account

You stop at a tea stall and scan the QR code stuck on its counter. You type ₹20 and your PIN. A small speaker on the counter announces that the payment has arrived. In the evening, you pay your rent from the same app.

In India, the phone has become the place people pay from. The system behind it is UPI, the Unified Payments Interface. It is a public system that moves money from one bank account to another in real time, meaning within seconds. People use UPI through apps, not through their banks. A handful of those apps now carry most of the country's payments, from the tea stall's QR code to the rent.

You scan the tea stall's QR code and pay ₹20 in a UPI app such as PhonePe, Paytm or super.money. UPI, the public system behind the apps, moves the money from your bank account to the stall's bank account within seconds, and a speaker on the counter announces that the payment has arrived.

This Market Segment covers the companies whose product is the phone that pays.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

This Market Segment has two sub-segments:

UPI and the wallet: the apps through which India pays

The account on the phone: digital banks and prepaid accounts, in India and abroad, that work under a bank's licence

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UPI and the wallet
The account on the phone

UPI and the wallet

UPI payment apps, digital wallets, merchant QR and payment speakers, bill payments

Take the ₹20 at the tea stall from the start of this Market Segment. You paid it through a UPI app. These are the companies behind such apps.

PhonePe

was founded in Bengaluru. It has engineers there and in Pune, and the most job postings in this Market Segment. Nearly half of India's UPI payments are made through its app. It has grown from payments into other products: a payment gateway for merchants, insurance, lending, and share trading through Share.Market.

Paytm

made the wallet and the QR code ordinary in India, before UPI. A wallet, or digital wallet, holds money that the user loads into it in advance. Paytm sells the app, the payment gateway, the terminals and the Soundbox. The Soundbox is the speaker in the shop that announces each payment aloud. Paytm appears here under two names: Paytm, with engineers in Delhi NCR, and One97 Communications Ltd, its parent company, with engineers in Bengaluru and Delhi NCR.

super.money

with engineers in Bengaluru, is Flipkart's UPI app. It adds cashback and credit on top.

SuperPe

with engineers in Bengaluru, and Innopay let a customer pay bills and rent by credit card.

Beyound

is a wallet powered by Pine Labs.

The Card Company

with engineers in Delhi NCR, sells a premium prepaid wallet and a metal card.

Two companies covered mainly in other Market Segments sell payments from their own apps:

Ola

with engineers in Bengaluru, sells Ola Money, the wallet and pay-later product for its rides. (More on Ola in Market Segment 38.6, Ride-hailing and shared mobility apps, in Industry Vertical 38, Automotive and mobility.)

Navi

with engineers in Bengaluru, has a UPI app beside its loans. (More on Navi in Market Segment 18.1, Digital lending and BNPL, in Industry Vertical 18, Lending and credit.)

The account on the phone

Digital banks and neobanks, prepaid accounts, youth and family money, earned wage access

In the first sub-segment, the app moved money out of an account you hold at a bank. In this sub-segment, the app is the bank account itself. A bank that exists only as an app is called a digital bank, or neobank. Running a bank needs a licence from the regulator. So most of these companies work on top of a partner bank's licence.

slice

with engineers in Bengaluru, began by lending to young people through a card. It is now a small finance bank. It offers the account, the credit line and the UPI payments of a bank, all run as an app. A credit line is an amount the customer may borrow whenever they need it. (slice also appears in Market Segment 18.4, Banks and NBFCs, in Industry Vertical 18, Lending and credit.)

Jupiter

with engineers in Bengaluru, and Niyo Solutions sell a digital account on top of a partner bank's licence. Niyo is best known for its zero-markup card, which Indians take abroad. Zero-markup means it adds no fee of its own on the exchange rate.

A UPI app moves money out of an account you hold at a bank. A digital bank such as Jupiter or Niyo Solutions is the account itself, on top of a partner bank's licence, and slice has gone further, to become a small finance bank with its own licence. The numbers 1 and 2 match the two sub-segments.

Three companies sell the same idea in other countries, and build in Bengaluru:

FairMoney

is a Nigerian digital bank.

OnePay

is an American app for deposits and earned wages, backed by Walmart. Earned wage access lets a worker take out pay they have already earned, before payday.

Greenlight

is an American debit card and app. Through it, parents give their children pocket money and teach them to invest.

One company here is covered mainly in another Market Segment:

Scapia

with engineers in Bengaluru, sells a travel credit card. (More on Scapia in Market Segment 29.5, Visa, trip planning and travel card apps, in Industry Vertical 29, Travel tech.)

The account that is only an app.

India's digital banks began on other banks' licences. They are now seeking their own, as slice has done. The payment apps, for their part, are adding loans, insurance and investments, until they are banks in everything but name. One question is still open. Will the bank of the next generation be a bank that built an app, or an app that became a bank?

That is the phone that pays. A UPI app moves your ₹20 to the tea stall in seconds. And for more and more people, the bank account itself is only an app.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What payments hires for.

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