Citrus Pay cashback festival to encourage digital payments; cash transactions our biggest competitors, says co-founder Jitendra Gupta

Last few years, most of us kick started the year with the Great Online Shopping Festival that was aimed at e-commerce awareness. As Google bid adieu to the shopping festival, we are seeing big players like Flipkart, Paytm and so on diving their own giant campaigns. Now, Citrus Pay has decided to take upon itself to create a platform for the next set of merchants wherein all brands can come under one roof and engage with consumers via the festival. After all, not everyone has a budget and financial muscle to drive large campaigns. So, it’s a weeklong of cashback bonanza that started on January 4 and will continue until January 10. Citrus’ cash back week has a multitude of brands and users avail of the offers across all platforms, be it online or walking into offline stores. Check out the offers here. In conversation with Firstpost, Jitendra Gupta, co-founder and MD of Citrus Pay tells us how the company aims at encouraging digital payments, not just online but also offline stores by empowering just about everyone from your local kirana store to a vegetable vendor. Citrus Pay is planning to bring digital payments on a broader base, and doesn’t limit to e-commerce sites or likewise. Gupta tells us that the campaign is aimed at driving traffic to merchants. On the other hand, also enable it with company products such as native app, Citrus wallet, card payments and the newest product in its kitty, Lazypay. LazyPay lets you make payments even without a banking account or cards.  He also refers to the change in pattern that has been witnessed in online payment and how easier it is getting to convince merchants to adopt digital payment options. It is very easy for merchants to go live with online payments and takes mere 30 minutes, he tells us. On the consumer front, he further explains how there has been enough awareness by bigger brands and people are accepting digital payments widely. He does mention initial hiccups, but quickly adds, it is just a circle with initial apprehensions, gradually taken over by incentives and convenience, and eventually it becomes a habbit. Currently, Citrus Pay has teamed up with 7000 merchants. It is live on about 10000 offline stores and has roadmap that increases the number by manifolds. Citrus Pay also targets to go live on more than 30,000 online stores this year. With an average transaction of roughly Rs 1000, Citrus Pay find Android as the predominant platform with 85 percent share. With a growth of 450 percent in 2015, Citrus pay says that the digital payment space is very promising and the market grew by 40-50 percent. This number is also driven by mobile payments as there has been a huge rise in this segment. In fact, Gupta tells us one of the biggest changes is the way and how quickly we are moving from desktop to mobile payments. Talking about its competitors, Gupta says cash transactions are its biggest competitors. Citrus Pay’s goal for this year is to convert cash into digital wallet and working towards bringing digital payments to day-to-day acceptance.