Update on December 4:

Truecaller Pay: user metrics 

  • Less than 25% of the user base comes from the top 6 cities. According to Sony Joy, VP of Payments at Truecaller, the payments user base demographics are slightly different from the other UPI services whose large chunk of users are usually based in the top 6-8 cities. 
  • 60% of users come from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities 
  • Currently, 1/3rd of the users are completely new to UPI 
  • 50% users in FY2019 will come from emerging markets in the country and they will be first time users of UPI 
  • Truecaller Pay is onboarding 25 million users by the end of FY2018
Joy told MediaNama that an average user typically carries out three kinds of transactions on Truecaller Pay — peer-to-peer takes up 40%, recharges and bill payments take up 50%, and merchant payments and other payments take up 10%. “Over time, the ratio of bill payments will increase since people have the option to make bill payments easily only now,” he said.
Inbox & Payments: Joy said that out of the 70-80 million global users of Truecaller’s inbox service, 65-70 million of them were in India.Truecaller will fine tune its ability to distinguish between financial information SMSs and promotional messages, both from banks. The app is also looking to integrate its inbox with payments: its working on active buttons on the inbox service which will redirect users to payments directly.

Lending: Truecaller Pay will launch its lending product by the first half of 2019, said Joy. The product will offer unsecured loans between Rs 25,000 to Rs 200,000, starting for a period of 3 months to 1-2 years. Joy refused to comment on which entity the company would tie-up with to offer loans. 

Earlier on November 29: Truecaller’s UPI service Truecaller Pay will go live with the Bharat Bill Payments System in early December, reports Mint. The app has already begun testing the feature with 54 billers and will go live with all the billers soon. MediaNama has reached out to Truecaller for more details and will update this when we hear from them.

Bharat Bill Payments Service is an integrated service for utility payment — electricity, DTH service, gas, water and mobile postpaid, broadband and landline bills. All bills can be paid at a single location and customers receive an instant confirmation once payment is made. As of October 31, the NPCI, which launched BBPS, lists 107 billers on the service including private and public services, and state and national providers. A complete list of the billers can be viewed here. A cursory glance shows listed billers from Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Orissa, among others.

Note that BBPS is already available other UPI apps like PhonePe, Google Pay (earlier Tez) and also Jio Money, Ezetap and Tapzo.

Sony Joy, Head of payments at Truecaller, told Mint that Truecaller Pay is currently on-boarding 100,000 daily users organically and that 50% of these users were experiencing UPI payments for the first time via Truecaller. Some of them were experiencing digital payments for the first time. He estimates that Truecaller Pay will have 25 million users by March just through organic channels.

Truecaller Pay was launched in partnership with ICICI Bank in March 2017. In June, Truecaller acquired payments app Chillr, which essentially became its Truecaller Pay team. Sony Joy also joined Truecaller from Chillr, where he was co-founder and CEO.

Airtel-Truecaller ID

Earlier this year, we reported that the Airtel Truecaller ID service had 1 million paid subscribers. Airtel had launched the offline caller ID service in April 2017 for feature phone users in partnership with Truecaller. The subscription service was meant for people without access to data.

Our Truecaller coverage here.