A gamut of products can attract users but costs a pretty penny. It also mixes up how the company tells users about itself.
It’s very difficult for Jupiter to convey if they are a neobank, or are just providing an experience, or are like an investment tracking portal, according to a former Jupiter executive, who spoke with BQ Prime on the condition of anonymity. Because of the multiple products, Jupiter’s marketing team has had difficulties conveying things to users, this person said.
For Gupta though, the addition of more products is part of widening Jupiter’s relationship with its customers. The company sees bank accounts more like a utility that it needs to build to usher in customers, but value addition happens with other things, Gupta said. “Standalone, it does not generate value. But, it is a very integral part to offer financial services,” he said.
“Neither the neobank nor the bank expects the savings bank account to be really sticky and flourishing,” said Jaikrishnan G, head of financial services consulting at Grant Thornton Bharat.
Jupiter facilitated 1.3 lakh systematic investment plan transactions in February, up from 70,000 a year before, Gupta said, regarding the traction of Jupiter’s mutual funds offering. Mutual funds have proven much less popular than digital gold, according to a second executive familiar with Jupiter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
While neobanks may have cracked customer experience, getting customers to invest with you typically also requires good advice bundled with it. “If you are looking for an investment, product experience does matter but not as much as the data for an information diet,” Jaikrishnan said.
But Jupiter has no plans to enter the advice business, Gupta said. “I think the research and advice, in my view, is still a 30+ [years of age] problem, not below 30. So, we are not getting in there,” he said.
Beyond investments, Jupiter also offers short-term payday loans that allow users to get their salaries in advance as a loan. The loan is interest-free till the next salary cycle but overdue amounts carry an interest rate of 18% per annum for Jupiter’s customers. For comparison, personal loans from a bank typically carry an annual interest rate of 10-12%.
In February—four months since the loans launched—Jupiter dispensed about 5,000 of them. “We thought it will take us seven to eight months to reach these numbers,” Gupta said, noting that the firm was positively surprised by the uptake.
Although the firm had also built an offering to deliver credit over UPI—called Jupiter Edge—it was put on hold after regulators asked Jupiter to shelve it.
Jupiter demonstrated the product to the National Payments Corp. of India when it was launched and received positive feedback on it, Gupta said. But, after four months of it being live, NPCI recommended that Jupiter should pause it till NPCI gets formal approval for credit rails on UPI from Reserve Bank of India, he said.
But the RBI didn’t feel comfortable with fintechs using credit rails on UPI and preferred to open those up via credit cards first, Gupta said. “We will relaunch it someday,” Gupta said, when asked whether he feels the story should have played out differently.
In addition to lending, Jupiter is also focused towards growing its base of salary accounts and acquired human resources technology start-up sumHR in February to boost its offerings.
It is focusing on more mature customers—users between 25 to 30 years of age are the largest set of customers Jupiter currently acquires—as compared to users between the ages of 23 to 26 earlier.