Flipkart's fintech arm super.money on Thursday launched SplitStore, an in-app shopping marketplace that lets users purchase products in zero-interest installments without a credit card, marking the company's most consequential move to turn India's dominant payments infrastructure into a profitable credit business. The launch was confirmed by multiple outlets including Bloomberg, Storyboard18, and NewsBytesApp on August 6, 2026.

The launch coincides with India's Parliament passing legislation to amend the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, creating the first legal framework since 2020 to allow possible merchant fees on Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions — ending a six-year-old zero-fee guarantee that had structured every Indian fintech's business model. Parliament passed the bill on August 6, the same day as SplitStore's launch, after its introduction in the Lok Sabha on August 4. Whether or not merchant fees ultimately return, super.money will now earn through credit — a bet that makes SplitStore's timing as strategic as its technology.

super.money Has More Than 15 Million Users — and Nothing To Earn From Most of Their Transactions

Launched in June 2024 as a "scan-and-pay" UPI application, super.money has grown in under two years into India's fifth-largest UPI platform by transaction volume, surpassing CRED, WhatsApp Pay, Amazon Pay, and BHIM. The app climbed the UPI rankings by offering cashback of up to 5% on merchant transactions and targeting digitally savvy first-time earners. As of September 2025, the app processed more than 256 million UPI transactions worth ₹9,852 crore (approximately $1.03 billion) per month, with more than 15 million users. Flipkart invested $30 million more in a September 2025 funding round, following an initial $20 million at spinoff.

The problem with that scale is structural. Since January 2020, UPI has carried a zero merchant discount rate (MDR), meaning no fee is collected when a merchant accepts a UPI payment. The Indian government scrapped merchant fees on UPI transactions to accelerate the network's adoption, replacing them with direct incentive schemes — approximately ₹1,500 crore (about $157 million) earmarked for low-value UPI transaction incentives in FY2024-25 — but for the fintech companies processing those billions of transactions, the economics are stark: the majority of their volume is a cost center, not a revenue line.

"We do UPI not to solve the pure payment use case," super.money CEO and founder Prakash Sikaria told TechCrunch. "We do UPI to build an interesting cross-financial services play where we are acquiring and retaining customers with UPI." The Kotak811 partnership Sikaria announced in October 2025 illustrated this strategy: using UPI as the acquisition layer, then cross-selling secured credit cards, fixed deposits, and lending products.

Super.money was already generating roughly $3 million per month in revenue from secured credit cards, fixed deposits, and lending partnerships, per TechCrunch's October reporting — an annualized run rate of approximately $36 million. SplitStore is designed to add the credit-marketplace layer that turns a payments network into a full-stack lending platform.

How SplitStore Works: BharatX's Credit Rails, Flipkart's Logistics

SplitStore's technical foundation arrived in February 2025 when super.money bought checkout platform BharatX, a Y Combinator-backed Bengaluru startup that had spent four years building documentation-free, credit-score-agnostic checkout financing.

BharatX's architecture — now powering SplitStore — does not ask users to submit pay stubs, credit histories, or formal income documentation. Instead, its system fetches user information (with consent) from mobile transaction history, using the mobile number itself plus the one-time password generated during a UPI payment as a form of biometric-style KYC verification. The system then matches the user with a regulated lending partner — a bank or non-banking financial company (NBFC) operating under RBI oversight — which underwrites each purchase through that arrangement.

This is a deliberate structural choice. Super.money operates as a Technology Service Provider (TSP), not as an NBFC — it arranges credit through regulated partners rather than lending from its own balance sheet. That positioning keeps super.money outside the scope of direct lending regulation while still earning origination revenue, and it means the company can scale without absorbing credit risk directly. "We are focused on product innovation in partnership with lenders, rather than taking on underwriting risk directly," Sikaria said. The TSP model allows super.money to benefit from BharatX's risk architecture without holding loans on its own books.

Under the SplitStore model, purchases are split into multiple zero-interest installments, with no processing fee charged to the buyer and no stated penalty for late payment. Products spanning brands like Apple and Nike — including Nothing smartphones, Nike footwear, and Marshall speakers, spanning approximately 6 million SKUs across electronics, fashion, furniture, and home appliances. Delivery logistics run through Flipkart's fulfillment network — giving super.money instant access to one of India's most mature last-mile supply chains.

BharatX had demonstrated the model worked at smaller scale, powering "pay in three" installment plans across more than 1,000 brands and growing to $2.5 million in annual recurring revenue in under six quarters. The acquisition brought its loan management, collection management, and risk underwriting technology into super.money's engineering stack; it took approximately 18 months to scale from a boutique checkout tool to a marketplace handling millions of SKUs.

Why Now: The Policy Shift That Made August 6 the Right Date

The regulatory development that frames SplitStore's timing is the August 6 passage of India's Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026 through the Lok Sabha. Parliament removed the blanket MDR prohibition, replacing it with a framework giving the central government authority to exempt specific payment modes from MDR charges by executive order — meaning that for the first time since 2020, merchant fees on UPI are legally possible. The amendment does not impose fees immediately, but the structural guarantee is gone.

From super.money's perspective, SplitStore is insurance in both directions: if UPI fees return, the company benefits from potentially lower incremental cost per transaction while already earning through credit; if they don't return, the credit marketplace provides the revenue stream that UPI's economics alone cannot. In either scenario, SplitStore makes super.money's business model more resilient than a pure payments play.

A second shift is regulatory consolidation. The Reserve Bank of India's Digital Lending Directions issued in May 2025 effectively winnowed the standalone BNPL sector: direct lending now requires regulated-entity partners, loan disbursement must flow directly to the borrower, and lending service providers face strict compliance requirements. Several early BNPL pioneers — ZestMoney and LazyPay among them — have pivoted or exited under this tightened regime. What remains is precisely the architecture super.money has chosen: platform-embedded credit, operated as a TSP, with banks and NBFCs as the underwriting partners.

India's Credit Gap: Why 95% of the Population Is the Target Market

The strategic logic behind SplitStore rests on a demographic constraint that credit card companies have failed to solve for decades. Credit card penetration in India sits at approximately 5% of the population — a number that has barely moved despite years of digital payments growth. The vast majority of the country's online shoppers, particularly in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, lack the credit history or documentation that traditional EMI programs tied to cards require.

Super.money's own data sharpens the picture. Sikaria has noted that 60–70% of the platform's transactions come from customers under 30 — people who have never held a credit card but already navigate UPI payments daily. SplitStore is designed as their entry point into formal consumer credit, with BharatX's transaction-history underwriting replacing the document-heavy application that credit card issuers require. At launch, Sikaria projected roughly 10% of super.money's user base — more than 1.5 million people — would shop through SplitStore.

"The way we think about BNPL or EMIs is that it becomes an introductory product for a lot of our consumers," Sikaria said. "It is the first financial services product they took from our stable and later on end up taking others." The BharatX acquisition positioned super.money to deliver on exactly this cross-sell thesis at scale.

How Does SplitStore Compare to Its Competitors?

The Indian BNPL market is projected to reach $30.45 billion in 2026, up from $24.86 billion in 2025, and is forecast to reach $62.61 billion by 2031. But the competitive field has thinned and consolidated.

Snapmint, the most direct structural parallel to SplitStore — UPI-first, no-credit-card-required, Tier 2 and Tier 3 focus — turned profitable in FY2025 with revenue reaching ₹158.5 crore (approximately $16.6 million) and then raised $125 million from General Atlantic in October 2025. Co-founder Nalin Agrawal projected a doubling of revenue in FY2026 — which means super.money is entering a market where proof of concept exists and the field is capitalized.

Amazon moved faster on the institutional side: it completed the acquisition of Axio (formerly Capital Float) in September 2025 for a sum exceeding $150 million, giving Amazon Pay a direct NBFC lending license, an established 15-million-customer credit base, and a checkout financing capability it is integrating across its commerce ecosystem.

What super.money offers that neither Snapmint nor Amazon/Axio can easily replicate is native distribution inside a UPI app with more than 15 million existing users who already use the platform for daily transactions. Card-linked EMI programs require a credit card as a prerequisite; SplitStore does not. Checkout widgets from standalone BNPL providers require the user to open a separate app or account; SplitStore does not. The credit layer sits inside the same application where users already scan QR codes, send money, and earn cashback — reducing the adoption friction to approximately zero.

Where This Fits in super.money's Full-Stack Ambition

Walmart-backed Flipkart has committed a total of $50 million to super.money since its spinoff — an initial $20 million at launch followed by an additional $30 million announced in September 2025. The company has publicly targeted $100 million annual revenue by 2026, with a lean team of approximately 130–150 people.

SplitStore is the credit piece of a three-pillar architecture Sikaria has described repeatedly: savings (via superFD fixed deposits at competitive interest rates), credit (now via SplitStore's embedded buy-now-pay-later), and eventually stock trading — all sitting on top of UPI's instant payment rails. The fixed-deposit product establishes a liability relationship with the user; SplitStore establishes the credit relationship; stock trading would complete the wealth-management layer. Each product cross-sells the others, and each is designed to raise the lifetime value of a user the app acquired cheaply through a UPI cashback offer.

India's largest cohort of new digital financial services users — the hundreds of millions who use UPI daily but have never swiped a credit card — now has a frictionless on-ramp to formal consumer credit inside an app they already open to pay for groceries. Whether super.money can profitably underwrite their installment purchases, at scale, under India's evolving regulatory framework, is the test that SplitStore's launch has just begun.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How does SplitStore's zero-interest installment model actually work — who pays for the "zero interest"?

SplitStore does not eliminate the cost of credit; it redistributes it. When a user splits a purchase, a regulated bank or NBFC underwrites the loan and is repaid in installments. The lender earns through the loan structure (spread, origination fee, or risk premium built into the terms), while super.money earns an origination or technology fee for connecting the borrower to the lender. The buyer pays no stated interest and no processing fee — but the credit cost is embedded in the financial structure shared between lender and platform, not truly absent.

Is SplitStore safe to use, and is it regulated?

SplitStore operates within India's RBI regulatory framework. Super.money functions as a Technology Service Provider (TSP) rather than as a lender, meaning the actual credit is extended by RBI-regulated banks or NBFCs that must comply with the Digital Lending Directions 2025 — including requirements for transparent Key Fact Statements, direct borrower-to-lender fund flows, and data localization. Users complete a KYC verification before accessing SplitStore credit. However, super.money has not disclosed which specific regulated entities serve as its lending partners for SplitStore, which makes independent verification of those partners' terms difficult before purchase.

What happens to India's UPI fintech industry if merchant fees come back?

India's Parliament passed legislation on August 6, 2026 creating the legal framework for the government to restore merchant fees on UPI transactions for large merchants by executive order — though no fees have been imposed yet. If fees return, platform-embedded fintech companies like super.money would likely benefit relative to standalone payment apps: they earn through credit products regardless of whether the payment layer generates transaction revenue, whereas pure payments apps lose the subsidy model with no alternative revenue. The fee debate accelerates the strategic logic behind every major Indian fintech's pivot toward credit, wealth management, and insurance.

Why can't ZestMoney or LazyPay compete with SplitStore in the same way?

ZestMoney and LazyPay were standalone BNPL brands that operated without a captive payment distribution network. When the RBI tightened digital lending regulations in 2022 and further in 2025, they faced compliance burdens and cost structures without the customer acquisition advantage of an embedded UPI application. ZestMoney effectively exited the market; LazyPay pivoted its product mix. SplitStore enters a market that regulatory consolidation has cleared, with a distribution advantage — 15 million existing UPI users — that a standalone BNPL startup cannot replicate without building the payment app first.