MobiKwik’s Upasana Taku flags fintech, D2C and e-commerce growth opportunities
MobiKwik co-founder Upasana Taku discusses building through the 2008 crisis, India’s digital-payments opportunity, funding challenges for women entrepreneurs and AI-led business planning. She identifies D2C, e-commerce and financial services as high-growth sectors.
What happened
Mobikwik · MobiKwik co-founder Upasana Taku discusses building an Indian fintech during the 2008 crisis, India’s digital-payments opportunity, women’s startup
Key facts
- 2008
Why this matters
Evaluate partnership or acquisition targets that combine payment infrastructure with high-growth D2C, e-commerce or AI-enabled financial-services capabilities.
What to watch
- UPI transaction growth, merchant acceptance expansion and changes in payment monetization rules.
- Growth in D2C checkout conversion, repeat purchases and adoption of embedded credit or loyalty products.
- RBI guidance on digital lending, data sharing, wallet economics and KYC requirements.
- Funding rounds, shutdowns and consolidation among Indian fintech, D2C and commerce-enablement startups.
- Delinquency trends in merchant cash advances, buy-now-pay-later and small-business digital loans.
- Adoption of AI tools for demand forecasting, inventory planning and merchant underwriting.
- Prioritize partnerships with D2C platforms and marketplace sellers where payments can be bundled with settlement, credit and analytics.
- Build merchant data products that translate transaction history into inventory, cash-flow and customer-retention recommendations.
- Track unit economics by merchant cohort; prepare to shift revenue emphasis from payment processing to value-added financial services.
- Create financing and accelerator channels for underserved founders and merchants, using alternative transaction data with robust risk controls.
- Stress-test AI business-planning tools for data quality, explainability, privacy and credit-model bias before customer deployment.