MobiKwik

Timeline

1. 2009Bipin Preet Singh, an electrical engineer who had been working at Freescale Semiconductor, quits his job and bootstraps the company with 5 lakh rupees of his own savings.
2. 2009Upasana Taku, who had worked at PayPal in the United States, joins the company, and a website with a closed wallet facility is launched from Dwarka in Delhi in August.
3. 2012A digital wallet and an Android application are built, and users begin keeping money in the wallet for future payments rather than using it once.
4. 2013The Reserve Bank of India authorises the semi-closed wallet, and the company signs up about 20,000 merchants including Jabong, Myntra and HomeShop18.
5. 2014The company says it has 15 million users, processes about 300,000 transactions a day and expects to reach a million a day.
6. 2015A 25 million dollar Series B round is raised from Tree Line Asia, Sequoia Capital, Cisco Systems and American Express.
7. 2016A 50 million dollar Series C round is led by GMO Internet and MediaTek, with Sequoia and Tree Line Asia joining in.
8. 2016Small loans of 500 to 2,500 rupees are offered to customers in a partnership with CashCare, the company's first big move into credit.
9. 2016MobiKwik Lite is launched for users on 2G networks, and demonetisation follows; transactions rise about 400 per cent by late December, with 1.5 million merchants and 55 million users.
10. 2017Bajaj Finance buys a 10.83 per cent stake for 225 crore rupees.
11. 2018The company becomes the first wallet in India to disburse a loan directly into a customer's mobile wallet.
12. 2019Loans, insurance and investment advice are added, and a partnership with DT One takes the service international.
13. 2019The year ends with a loss of 141.8 crore rupees, the deepest in the company's history to that point.
14. 2020The app is briefly removed from the Google Play Store for a violation of the store's advertising policy, and the year ends with a loss of 84.6 crore rupees.
15. 2021The company becomes the first wallet in India to charge inactive users a maintenance fee of between 100 and 140 rupees.
16. 2021A researcher claims KYC data of nearly 100 million users was taken from a company server and offered for sale; the company denies it and says it will take legal action.
17. 2021The draft red herring prospectus is filed in July for an initial public offering of 1,900 crore rupees, with 1,500 crore as a fresh issue and 400 crore as an offer for sale.
18. 2021A secondary sale of employee stock led by Mathew Cyriac values the company at about 1 billion dollars, making it a unicorn.
19. 2021The listing is deferred after Paytm's weak market debut, and the company ends the year without the public issue it had planned.
20. 2022Transactions from the wallet to major crypto exchanges in India are suspended.
21. 2024For the year ended March 2024 the company reports revenue of 875 crore rupees, up 62 per cent, and a net profit of 14 crore rupees against a loss of 80.6 crore rupees a year earlier.
22. 2024Investors complain after anytime withdrawals are suspended on Xtra, the peer to peer lending platform run with Lendbox.
23. 2024The initial public offering is launched in the second week of December and raises 572 crore rupees; the shares list on 18 December 2024 at a premium of about 58 per cent.
24. 2025The company reports a profit for the quarter ended December 2025, its first in the listing era, and the shares respond.
25. 2026The quarter ended March 2026 is also profitable, with revenue of about 289 crore rupees, and the quarter ended June 2026 brings revenue of 281.48 crore rupees and a profit of 7.6 crore rupees.
26. 2026The company says it serves about 193 million registered users and about 5 million merchants, and reports that payment gross merchandise value on its platform grew 50 per cent.
27. 2026The digital foreign exchange service is expanded to six currencies including the UAE dirham and the euro, in a partnership with NPCI Bharat BillPay.
28. 2026A merchant discount rate of 0.4 per cent on eligible UPI transactions above 2,000 rupees is announced for 15 October and then deferred beyond Diwali; shares of MobiKwik and its peers fall on the news.

What it does

One MobiKwik Systems Limited, which trades as MobiKwik, is an Indian financial technology company based in Gurugram, Haryana. It runs a consumer payments app that combines a mobile wallet with UPI payments, a merchant payment gateway, a lending business and a distribution shelf that sells insurance, mutual funds and foreign exchange. The company was founded in 2009 and listed on the Indian exchanges in December 2024.^[1][2]

The consumer app is the front door. Users load or link money, pay bills, transfer funds, pay merchants and, increasingly, borrow. The wallet that the company started with is now one product among several, and the business reports itself in three segments: consumer payments, financial technology, and the payment gateway that serves merchants.^[1]

The financial technology segment is where the money is made. It includes ZIP, the buy now pay later line, ZIP EMI, which puts a personal loan into a customer's bank account, loans sourced through partners, insurance distribution and small ticket investments. Lending brought in none of the company's early revenue but it now carries the smallest ticket and the highest margin per user.^[3][11]

The gateway segment serves businesses that want to accept digital payments, including through UPI. It is the least glamorous part of the company and the one most exposed to regulation, because the economics of UPI are set by the National Payments Corporation of India and the Reserve Bank rather than by the market. When a merchant discount rate on large UPI transactions was finally announced in September 2026, it moved the shares of every listed payments company, MobiKwik included, even though the fee arrives on only part of the transaction base.^[2][10]

What the company is not is a lender with a licence of its own. MobiKwik largely originates and distributes credit through partners and takes a fee and a share of the economics, which keeps its balance sheet light and means its profit depends on lending volumes and credit costs at those partners rather than on its own capital.^[1][3]

History

MobiKwik was founded by Bipin Preet Singh and Upasana Taku. Singh graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2002 and worked as an engineer at Freescale Semiconductor before quitting on impulse to start a company. He bootstrapped the business with 5 lakh rupees of his own savings and launched a website from Dwarka in Delhi in August 2009. Taku, who had worked with PayPal in the United States, joined the same year and took charge of business development and merchant operations.^[1][6][5]

The first version of the product was a closed wallet with very limited services. The break came in 2012, when the company built a wallet that could hold a balance and an Android application to go with it. Users started leaving money in the wallet for later payments without being given any incentive to do so, and the company realised that mobile, not the website, was where the growth would come from. More than 80 per cent of its users were on the app within a few years.^[6]

The Reserve Bank authorised the semi-closed wallet in July 2013, which turned a payment utility into a regulated business that could hold customer money and settle with merchants. The company then went after mobile shoppers, signing up about 20,000 merchants including Jabong, Myntra and HomeShop18, and took a merchant fee of about 3 per cent on transactions. Unlike Paytm, it chose not to sell products or run a marketplace, and its founders said plainly that they wanted to stay a payments company rather than become a brand that did everything.^[6]

Money followed the users. In 2015 the company raised 25 million dollars in a Series B round from Tree Line Asia, Sequoia Capital, Cisco Systems and American Express, and in May 2016 it raised a 50 million dollar Series C round led by GMO Internet and MediaTek. The presence of Cisco and American Express on the register, alongside Sequoia, was unusual for an Indian wallet company of that period, and it became one of the ways the company distinguished itself from the larger and better funded Paytm.^[1][5]

In 2016 the company took its first serious step into credit, offering loans of 500 to 2,500 rupees with CashCare, and then the whole market changed under it. Demonetisation in November 2016 pushed users who had never paid digitally onto wallets, and MobiKwik's transactions rose about 400 per cent by late December. The company had 1.5 million merchants and 55 million users at that point and had just launched MobiKwik Lite, an app for slow 2G networks aimed squarely at users who could not run the full application.^[1][14]

The years after demonetisation were harder. Bajaj Finance bought 10.83 per cent for 225 crore rupees in August 2017, which gave the company a large strategic shareholder but also put it in the same stable as a consumer lender that could do the lending part itself. The company lost 141.8 crore rupees in the year ended March 2019 and 84.6 crore rupees in the year ended March 2020, and it took a public relations hit in May 2020 when its app was briefly removed from the Google Play Store over an advertising policy violation.^[1][5]

By the time it filed for its public offering, the business had been rebuilt around financial services rather than the wallet. The draft papers filed in July 2021 showed a company that was losing money on a 302 crore rupee annual income and had just become an aggregator of mutual funds and small ticket credit. It was the beginning of a five year stretch in which the story changed from how many users the wallet had to how much profit each user produced.^[5][11]

The wallet years and demonetisation

For most of its first decade MobiKwik was a wallet company, and the economics of wallets in India were unkind. A customer loads money, pays a bill or a merchant, and the wallet earns a small fee from the merchant. Nothing is earned from the customer unless the customer borrows, invests or pays for a subscription. The company said in 2014 that it earned about 3 per cent from merchants and that it deliberately refused to buy users with heavy discounts, arguing that it wanted active users rather than customers who transact once.^[6]

The licence mattered more than the app. The semi-closed wallet authorisation of 2013 allowed the company to hold customer funds and settle with merchants, and it was the reason a wallet could be offered as a payment method on e-commerce sites at all. When the Reserve Bank later allowed wallets to join UPI, the company's utility rose again because users could pay any UPI merchant rather than only the merchants it had signed up.^[10]

Demonetisation was the peak of the wallet era and also its end. Between November 2016 and the middle of 2017 the company added users at a rate it never repeated, and it spent close to 100 crore rupees on marketing in 2016. The customers were real but their value was low: a user who joins a wallet during a cash shortage to pay one bill is not necessarily a user who stays. The years that followed were spent converting that crowd into paying users of loans and financial products.^[6][13]

The company also experimented with instruments that no other wallet had tried. In October 2018 it became the first wallet in India to put a loan directly into a customer's mobile wallet, at a time when lenders could not easily reach customers without a bank account and the wallet was the account. In February 2021 it went the other way and started charging inactive users a maintenance fee of between 100 and 140 rupees, the first such charge in the Indian market, which was widely read as an admission that a large part of the wallet base was dormant.^[2][3]

By the time the wallet was one product among many, the company's own description of itself had changed from a wallet company to a financial services platform, and the reporting segments changed with it. The wallet still brings in users, but the money comes from what those users do next. One legacy idea did not survive the transition: an offer that promised users an annual profit on the money they left in the wallet drew sceptical coverage from the financial press, because a wallet is not a deposit account and the promise could not be guaranteed in the way a bank guarantees interest.^[11][12]

Lending: ZIP, ZIP EMI and Xtra

Credit is the centre of the modern company. ZIP is a buy now pay later line that lets a customer split a payment, and ZIP EMI is a personal loan product where the money is credited to the customer's bank account. The ticket sizes are deliberately mid market: ZIP EMI offers loans of between 10,000 and 2 lakh rupees, and the buy now pay later line allows purchases up to 60,000 rupees. In January 2025 the company added a partnership with Piramal Finance so that its users could apply for personal loans of 50,000 to 2 lakh rupees through the platform.^[2][3]

MobiKwik's own reporting describes the lending book through the fees and the margins it earns rather than through the principal it lends, because most of the money comes from partners. That model protects the company from credit losses but caps the upside, and it makes the lending line sensitive to how willing banks and non banking lenders are to fund loans to thin file customers.^[1][3]

The company's lending revenue grew faster than anything else in the business and with it the cost. In the year ended March 2024 lending operating expenses rose 294 per cent to 270 crore rupees from 68.5 crore rupees a year earlier, while payment processing costs rose far more slowly, from 148 crore to 200 crore rupees. The company's explanation was that lending expenses buy future revenue, and by 2026 its results commentary claimed that lending net margins had risen significantly year on year.^[3][2]

Xtra, the peer to peer lending platform run with the partner Lendbox, was the other side of the credit story and the messier one. In September 2024 the company faced criticism after it suspended anytime withdrawals, with investors complaining that their money had been reinvested in new borrowers without their consent. The company said the change came from its peer to peer partner and that users would not be able to withdraw on the old terms. The episode showed how much of the customer relationship the company had placed in the hands of partners whose terms it did not fully control.^[1]

Insurance, mutual funds and foreign exchange sit alongside lending on the same shelf. The company became a mutual fund aggregator before its first listing attempt, added accident, life and fire insurance, and in September 2026 expanded a digital foreign exchange service to six currencies including the dirham and the euro through a partnership with NPCI Bharat BillPay. None of these lines is large on its own; together they are the company's answer to the question of what a payments app does once the payment itself earns almost nothing.^[1][2][16]

Merchants, UPI and the payment gateway

The merchant side of the business began as a way to make the wallet useful. By 2014 MobiKwik had about 20,000 online merchants and was the default payment option on the Domino's Pizza website and among the top options on eBay, ShopClues and Purplle. The company also became the first wallet in India that could be used for in store payments, starting with Cafe Coffee Day, and it began door to door collection of cash with a minimum top up of 100 rupees so that users without bank accounts could load the wallet.^[6]

Scale came with demonetisation and then with UPI. The company reported more than 3 million merchants and over 107 million users when it filed its first draft prospectus in 2021, and 3.44 million merchant partners with 101.37 million registered users as of 31 March 2021 in the papers themselves. By 2026 it was describing about 5 million merchants and about 193 million registered users, with payment gross merchandise value on the platform growing 50 per cent.^[4][5][2]

Merchant acquiring in India is a business with almost no margin on UPI, because person to merchant transactions have been free since 2020, and the payments volumes therefore matter for two reasons only: they keep the brand in front of the customer, and they feed the data that the lending business uses to decide whom to lend to. That is why the company kept investing in merchant acceptance even while the segment lost money.^[2][10]

The payment aggregator licence from the Reserve Bank was the structural step that let the company serve merchants directly. It had an in principle approval in October 2023 and was described as holding it in the reporting for the year ended March 2024. The licence is what allows the gateway segment to exist as a business rather than as a feature of the wallet.^[1][3]

The gateway also puts the company in a queue it cannot control. When the National Payments Corporation of India announced in September 2026 that merchants would pay 0.4 per cent on eligible UPI transactions above 2,000 rupees, capped at 300 rupees for payments of 75,000 rupees or more, the listed payments companies rallied; when the rollout was deferred beyond Diwali a month later, the same shares fell by up to 10 per cent in a day. Nothing about MobiKwik's product changed on either day.^[2]

The IPO and life as a listed company

MobiKwik first tried to go public in 2021. It filed its draft red herring prospectus in July 2021 for an issue of 1,900 crore rupees, made up of a fresh issue of 1,500 crore rupees and an offer for sale of 400 crore rupees by existing shareholders, and it received the markets regulator's approval in the autumn. The company was then valued at 700 million dollars after a 20 million dollar investment by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority in June 2021, and a secondary sale of employee stock led by the former Blackstone India head Mathew Cyriac in October 2021 valued it at about 1 billion dollars, which made it a unicorn.^[4][5][8]

It did not list. In November 2021 the company said it would delay the offering after Paytm's disastrous market debut soured the market for new age technology issues, and the plan was shelved. The decision looked sensible at the time and cost the company three years of access to public capital.^[7]

The company tried again in December 2024 and this time it went through. The issue raised 572 crore rupees and the shares listed on 18 December 2024 at a premium of about 58 per cent to the issue price. The offering had been subscribed several times over, with bids reported at about 4.7 billion dollars against an issue of a few hundred crore rupees.^[1][2]

Life as a listed company changed the company's reporting and its tone. Management began to lead with profitability rather than with user growth, and the results of the last three quarters of the period covered here are a company that has crossed into profit at a small scale: a profit of about 4 crore rupees in the quarter ended December 2025, about 4 crore rupees in the March 2026 quarter on revenue of about 289 crore rupees, and 7.6 crore rupees in the June 2026 quarter on revenue of 281.48 crore rupees, which the company described as its third consecutive profitable quarter.^[2]

The market has not rewarded the company as much as the operating numbers might suggest. New age listings of 2024 have had a poor record in India: an analysis of 27 such companies found that seven of the 17 that opened at a premium now trade below their issue price, and MobiKwik is on that list. The stock also moves with policy news about UPI fees, and in October 2026 the shares fell alongside Paytm and Pine Labs when the merchant fee rollout was delayed beyond the festive season.^[2]

Revenue and financials

The company's financial history is a long curve of losses followed by a short and sharp turn. It lost 141.8 crore rupees in the year ended March 2019 and 84.6 crore rupees in the year ended March 2020, and its total income in the year ended March 2021 fell 18 per cent to 302.2 crore rupees while the loss widened to 111.3 crore rupees. The company spent that period paying for users in a market where the two largest wallets were fighting a price war they could not win on fees.^[5]

The turn came with credit. For the year ended March 2024 the company reported a net profit of 14 crore rupees against a loss of 80.6 crore rupees in the previous year, and operational revenue rose 62 per cent to 875 crore rupees from 539 crore rupees. The cost line that grew fastest was lending, up 294 per cent to 270 crore rupees, while payment processing rose to 200 crore rupees from 148 crore. This was the first full year in which the company could point to a profit without an exceptional item, and management said it intended to keep the profitable streak.^[3]

The quarters since have been consistent but small. In the quarter ended March 2026 the company reported revenue of about 289 crore rupees, up about 8 per cent, and a profit of about 4 crore rupees against a loss of about 56 crore rupees in the same quarter a year earlier. In the quarter ended June 2026 revenue from operations rose 3.7 per cent to 281.48 crore rupees and the consolidated profit was 7.6 crore rupees against a loss of 41 crore rupees a year earlier. The company described that as three profitable quarters in a row and credited lower costs and better lending margins.^[2]

The revenue mix explains why the growth looks modest. Consumer payment revenue is close to a utility and its growth tracks transaction volumes rather than pricing; the lending and distribution businesses grow faster but from a small base; and the gateway business earns very little on UPI. A 3.7 per cent quarter on quarter revenue rise with a doubling of profit is a cost story, not a growth story, and management has been explicit that the plan is embedded profitability rather than scale for its own sake.^[2]

The user numbers in the same disclosures are the market's reason to stay interested. The company says it has about 193 million registered users and about 5 million merchants, with payment gross merchandise value up 50 per cent. If even a small fraction of a base that size takes a loan or buys insurance through the app each year, the financial technology segment has room to grow without adding a single new user, which is the argument the company makes to investors.^[2]

Shareholding and ownership

The two founders have always been the largest individual shareholders. When the draft prospectus was filed in July 2021, Bipin Preet Singh and Upasana Taku together owned 34.5 per cent and planned to sell shares worth over 191 crore rupees in the offering. Sequoia Capital India held 17.2 per cent and Bajaj Finance 13.8 per cent, with American Express, Cisco, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Tree Line Asia also on the register. Bennett, Coleman and Company held 1.08 per cent.^[5]

Institutional ownership was the story of the company's first decade. Sequoia had led the Series A and B rounds, Bajaj Finance came in as a strategic investor in 2017, ADIA bought 2.7 per cent for 20 million dollars in June 2021, and the company had raised more than 165 million dollars in equity and debt by the time of its first listing attempt. That is a lot of outside money for a company that was still loss making, and it is why the 2024 listing was, for several of those investors, an exit rather than a milestone.^[4][5][8]

The company listed as a professionally managed company rather than as a promoter run one, a distinction it made explicitly in its draft papers. That classification reflects the fact that no single shareholder controls the board, and it is the reason the founders' stake was described in the papers as a shareholding rather than as control.^[5]

Since listing, the shareholder base has turned over again. Mutual funds that had been allotted shares in the offering have exited some positions, and in August 2026 One MobiKwik was named among the stocks from which mutual funds made a complete exit in July. Lock in expiries have released further stock for trade, with one such expiry in June 2026 freeing up about 317 crore rupees worth of shares.^[2]

Founders and leadership

Bipin Preet Singh is the founder and managing director. He graduated in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2002 and worked at Freescale Semiconductor before leaving to start the company in 2009. He seeded it with 5 lakh rupees of savings, built the first website and the first payment options himself, and rented the first office in Dwarka. He has been the company's public voice on strategy, and he has repeatedly described credit and financial services rather than the wallet as the company's future.^[1][5][6]

Upasana Taku is co-founder, chairperson and chief operating officer. She studied in India and in the United States and worked at PayPal before joining the company in 2009, and she has run business development, merchant operations and, in recent years, the company's public communication, including the results commentary that first announced the company's profits. She also bought about 1.07 lakh shares of the company for about 2.12 crore rupees in the open market in October 2026, a purchase by a promoter that was reported as a signal of confidence.^[1][2][6]

The founders' division of labour has been stable for the life of the company: Singh on product and technology, Taku on merchants, partnerships and customer facing operations. The pairing of an engineer who had worked on semiconductors with an executive who had worked at PayPal gave the company a competence in payments rails that the first generation of Indian wallet companies did not all have.^[6]

The wider leadership is drawn from the payments and consumer lending world rather than from the startup celebrity circuit, and the company has kept a low profile in a market where Paytm, PhonePe and BharatPe generated far more attention. Its own framing of that difference is that it is a payments company that stays a payments company, a line its founders used as early as 2014 when Paytm was building a marketplace alongside its wallet.^[6]

Employees and offices

The company's base is in Gurugram, Haryana, and it began from an office in Dwarka in west Delhi, which is where the first wallet infrastructure was built. In the beginning the team was tiny: MobiKwik had about 35 employees in 2013 and about 100 by 2014, when it was planning to hire another 150 to support its expansion into offline payments.^[1][6]

The headcount has never been the company's headline number. What the company has published in recent years is the size of its user base, its merchant network and the margin on its lending book, and the public disclosures that accompany its listed status report segment revenue and profit rather than staffing. For a business with about 193 million registered users, the operating organisation has stayed deliberately small and has leaned on bank, lender and gateway partners to carry the parts of the value chain it does not want to own.^[2]

The company also runs a distributed presence through partners rather than through branches. Cash collection at the customer's door, merchant acquisition in smaller towns and the foreign exchange service that hands over currency notes through partner branches all extend the company's reach without adding employees, and they are the mechanism by which it has grown beyond Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru.^[2][6]

Its technology is centralised, which is a deliberate cost decision. The wallet, the gateway, the lending platform and the distribution shelf all run on the same core, so a new product such as the foreign exchange service or the smaller ZIP EMI ticket can be added to the app without building a new operating unit.^[2]

Partnerships and joint ventures

• CashCare (2016): the first lending partnership, which put loans of 500 to 2,500 rupees in front of wallet users and started the company's move into credit.^[1]
• Bajaj Finance (2017): the consumer lender bought 10.83 per cent of the company for 225 crore rupees, a stake that later put it among the largest outside shareholders.^[5]
• DT One (2019): an international partnership that expanded mobile recharges and value transfer for the company's users abroad.^[1]
• Lendbox (2021 onwards): the peer to peer partner behind Xtra, the platform that later drew complaints when anytime withdrawals were suspended in September 2024.^[1]
• Piramal Finance (2025): a partnership that lets users apply for personal loans of 50,000 to 2 lakh rupees through ZIP EMI.^[2]
• NPCI Bharat BillPay (2026): the partnership behind the digital foreign exchange service, which was extended to six currencies including the UAE dirham and the euro.^[2]
• Reserve Bank of India authorisations: the semi-closed wallet from 2013 and the in principle approval for a payment aggregator licence held in the year ended March 2024, both of which decide what the company is allowed to sell.^[3][6]

Competition

Paytm has been the comparison from the beginning. The two companies started in the same year, took the same wallet licence, and fought for the same merchants, but Paytm also built a marketplace and a commerce business and MobiKwik chose not to. By 2014 Paytm had 25 million users against MobiKwik's 15 million, a million transactions a day against 300,000, and an annual turnover of 6,200 crore rupees against 1,500 crore rupees. The gap in attention never closed.^[6]

The bigger problem for the entire wallet generation was UPI. When the Reserve Bank allowed wallets onto the UPI rails, the advantage of a proprietary wallet balance disappeared, because every app could pay every UPI merchant. PhonePe and Google Pay became the default payment apps for hundreds of millions of users, and the fee paid by merchants for person to merchant UPI payments was set at zero, which removed the merchant fee that wallets had lived on. For MobiKwik the answer was credit: the fee that no longer existed on payments survives on lending, insurance and investments.^[2][10]

FreeCharge was the other direct rival, and the two companies fought openly, including a public argument carried on through their own blogs when FreeCharge offered users a free movie ticket and MobiKwik disputed the value of the offer. FreeCharge was eventually bought by Axis Bank and the category consolidated.^[15]

Among listed peers, the fight is now about which payments company can convert a user base into a lending book fastest. Paytm and Pine Labs trade on the same UPI policy news and are measured on the same metric of take rate per user, and the National Payments Corporation of India's decision to introduce, delay and re price the merchant discount rate in 2026 moved all three stocks within days of each other. MobiKwik's position in that group is the smallest by revenue and the most dependent on credit distribution for its margin.^[2]

The competitor that is not a company is the bank. A wallet that helps a customer borrow, save and pay is doing parts of what a bank does, without a banking licence, and the Reserve Bank has been tightening the rules that separate the two. When MobiKwik applied for a payments bank licence in 2015 it did not get one, and the company's plan to become a bank was quietly dropped in favour of partnerships with the lenders that do hold the licences.^[6]

Controversies and criticism

The most serious episode in the company's history is the data breach claim of 2021. On 25 February 2021 a security researcher said that a hacker group had taken the know your customer records of nearly 100 million users from a company server and put them up for sale on the dark web. The company denied the claim on 4 March and said it would take legal action against the researcher. Independent researchers and users later confirmed that MobiKwik data was available online, and in March 2021 it was reported that the company had engaged a third party to conduct a forensic data security audit. In its draft prospectus the company told the market that it had replied to the Reserve Bank's communication on the matter and had undertaken to resolve pending information technology issues within a stipulated period.^[9][5]

The second criticism is about the terms of its lending products. In September 2024 the company faced investor complaints after it suspended anytime withdrawals on Xtra, the peer to peer platform it runs with Lendbox, with users saying their money had been reinvested in new borrowers without their consent. MobiKwik said the withdrawal policy had been changed by its peer to peer partner and that users would not be able to withdraw their money on the previous terms. For a company that markets itself on trust with small savers, a change imposed by a partner it had chosen was an awkward defence.^[1]

The way the company has treated dormant customers has also drawn comment. In February 2021 it became the first wallet in India to charge inactive users a maintenance fee of between 100 and 140 rupees, a charge that was legal but that turned a customer acquisition cost into a customer annoyance, and that made the size of the company's inactive base visible to everyone.^[2]

There have been smaller regulatory and platform scrapes. In May 2020 the app was briefly removed from the Google Play Store for violating the store's advertising policy, and in 2022 the company suspended wallet transactions to all major crypto exchanges in India at a time when it was still describing itself as a financial services platform. Neither event changed the strategy, but both show how much of the company's distribution sits on rails owned by others.^[1]

The criticism that matters most to investors is the one about size. The company has been profitable for three consecutive quarters on revenue of a little under 300 crore rupees a quarter, which makes it a small listed company with a large registered user base. Its shares list on the same exchanges as companies several times its size, and the market's verdict so far, shared with most new age listings of its vintage, is that profitability at this scale has not been enough to hold the listing price.^[2]

Reading the numbers

MobiKwik is best read as two businesses with one app. The payments business is a utility that earns very little per transaction, keeps 193 million users and 5 million merchants attached to the brand, and gives the company the data it needs to decide whom to lend to. The financial technology business is a distribution and credit franchise that earns the margin, and it is the part whose growth decides whether the company compounds.^[1][2]

The first number to watch is the lending margin. In the year ended March 2024 lending operating expenses rose 294 per cent to 270 crore rupees while total revenue rose 62 per cent to 875 crore rupees, which is what a business scaling a loan book looks like from the inside. By the quarter ended June 2026 the company was reporting lower costs and better lending margins as the reason for its profit, so the question for the next few years is whether the same lending engine can grow without the expenses growing faster than the revenue a second time.^[3][2]

The second number is revenue per user. With about 193 million registered users and quarterly revenue a little under 300 crore rupees, the company is earning roughly fifteen rupees per registered user per quarter. That number has to rise for the company to become a large one, and it can only rise through credit and distribution, because payments revenue per user is structurally close to zero in India.^[2]

The third is the policy setting. UPI merchant fees, wallet regulation and payment aggregator rules are decided by the Reserve Bank and the National Payments Corporation of India, and each announcement moves the company's revenue line and its share price. The merchant discount rate saga of 2026, announced in September and deferred in October, is the clearest example: a single regulatory decision worth a few tens of crores of rupees a year swung the shares by up to 10 per cent in a day.^[2]

Finally, the capital structure. The company raised more than 165 million dollars of private capital before it listed and then raised 572 crore rupees in the offering, and it has spent years funding losses with that money. It is now funding itself from operations, at a small profit, which means that growth has to come from the lending book and its partners rather than from another round of equity.^[5][1]

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