Fintech Startup FPL Ties-Up With Visa To Launch Mobile-First Credit Card

SUMMARY

FPL will issue credit cards in partnership with banks

FPL's Credit card will leverage Visa’s technology and global acceptance footprint

FPL has recently raised $4.5 Mn from Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital and other angel investors

Pune-based fintech startup First Principle Labs Technologies (FPL Tech) has announced its partnership with global card payments company Visa to launch a mobile-first credit card in India. In addition to the credit card, FPL will provide its customers with a mobile application to manage aspects of their credit life cycle.

With this alliance, FPL will issue credit cards in partnership with banks. Additionally, the credit card will leverage Visa’s technology and global acceptance footprint to make it available for a wide range of use cases.

The announcement of the launch of a credit card by FPL comes after the company has raised $4.5 Mn, in September 2019, from Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital and other angel investors.

After the 2016 demonetisation, there has been an increased dependence on digital payments such as cards, UPI, and mobile wallets. While access to debit cards, UPI, and mobile wallets has reached most of the users in the country, credit cards are yet to gain popularity among digitally savvy young millennials. And FPL wants to tap into this space with the credit card launch.

Moreover, FPL claims that it has created a proprietary full-stack technology platform to deliver an improved credit card experience to its customers.

Earlier, in July 2019, FPL has launched the OneScore mobile application to help customers understand and manage their credit score and behaviour in a simple and secure way. The company claims that the application has already acquired over 400K users in the last four months.

FPL Tech was founded by Anurag Sinha, Rupesh Kumar, and Vibhav Hathi in September 2018. With the launch of consumer credit cards, FPL Tech claims to disrupt the market by making agents or sales marketing professionals obsolete in the process.

Sinha, who is also the CEO of the company, said that existing credit cards need to be more digital, flexible, transparent, and personalised to end-consumers to build scale.

With India being home to the world’s largest population of millennials, estimated to spend $330 Bn annually by 2020, according to a Morgan Stanley report, this presents a massive opportunity for solutions that address the consumption behaviour of the segment like the one FPL has created.