BREAKINGVIEWS-Walmart's PhonePe ought to get a bit of credit

By Shritama Bose

MUMBAI, Sept 29 (Reuters Breakingviews) - India's financial technology startups are lining up for credit. Among them is Walmart-backed WMT.N payments champion PhonePe, which on Wednesday said it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering in Mumbai. A mooted $15 billion valuationlooks punchy, but its shot at grabbing the ultimate fintech prize in the country is half decent.

The U.S. retailer owns about 84% of the startup, which it acquired as part of its 2018 acquisition of e-commerce platform Flipkart. PhonePe's target valuation would imply a multiple of 13 times sales for the year to end March 2026, assuming its topline grows at the same 40% pace as it did in the previous year. That compares to 9 times Paytm-owner One97 Communications PAYT.NS commands among investors.

PhonePe is superior in multiple ways. Though Paytm swung to profit in the June quarter, PhonePe's losses are narrowing and it has faced none of the regulatory heat that has mired its rival. The Walmart unit also enjoys a 46% share in transactions passing through India's homegrown bank-to-bank mobile payments system, where its closest competitor is an application owned by Alphabet's GOOGL.O Google.

Yet simple payment transactions earn no fees in India. To profit, PhonePe needs to gradually convert its 200 million monthly active users and 40 million-strong merchant network into customers of financial products, from loans to insurance and mutual funds.

It's a promise that Paytm is starting to realise. Its revenue from financial services distribution doubled during the year to end June and accounted for 29% of its quarterly topline. PhonePe, by virtue of its bigger share of payments, ought to have a larger database spanning utility bill payments to restaurant outings that it can leverage to decide who is creditworthy.

The upstart will probably churn out a different, slightly lower, class of customer to those chased by India's traditional lenders, including HDFC Bank HDBK.NS and ICICI Bank ICBK.NS. They already have strong digital sourcing engines, however, so there will be some overlap in who they target. And the $72 billion Bajaj Finance BJFN.NS has a formidable grip on the consumer loan market too that's proven hard to break.

Yet if India is to produce anything like a real fintech winner, PhonePe is more than likely to be it.

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CONTEXT NEWS

Walmart-backed Indian fintech firm PhonePe on September 24 said it has confidentially filed for a Mumbai initial public offering.

The company plans to raise around 120 billion rupees ($1.35 billion) through a sale of existing shares, Moneycontrol reported on the same day, citing unnamed industry sources. Walmart, Tiger Global and Microsoft could sell a combined 10% stake in the IPO, the report added.

PhonePe narrowed losses during the year ended March 31 to 17.3 billion rupees ($194.7 million) from 19.96 billion rupees ($225 million) in the previous 12-month period, the company said in a regulatory filing on September 22.