Health insurance still isn’t a common investment term for many in India. Hence, a huge part of the population struggles with financing their families’ day-to-day healthcare.  

According to health insurance statistics in India, 31% of hospitalizations are financed with loans and 47% by selling assets.

Also, 70% of Indians spend their entire income on healthcare, and 3.2% go under the poverty line due to excessive medical costs. 

As per the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI), Goal 2047 aims to cover 100% of India’s population under insurance by 2047. However, around 40 crore Indians still lack health insurance for various reasons.  

Reasons for low insurance penetration 

As per studies, there are multiple reasons why people may not opt for insurance: 

Talking about high premiums, 4 out of 10 people find insurance premiums very high, discouraging them from getting insurance.  

Consider a family of four – a couple and their two children.

For health insurance cover of ₹10 lakhs, they need to pay a premium of about ₹25,000 annually. As the monthly disposable income of 80% of Indian households is below ₹20000, paying the premium upfront is a challenge.  

How PayU is supporting the insurance industry with EMI integration

PayU understands that customers have buying intent but may be limited by their budgets. We strive to best support our partner businesses in providing their customers with the best affordability solutions. Insurance penetration with PayU’s EMI Integration

Our product suite includes the best EMI schemes – be it on credit cards from 16+ issuers or debit cards from 6+ issuers. People who don’t have credit or debit cards can opt for cardless EMIs supported by 6+ partners.

One of our partner businesses, a leading health insurance brand, trusts us with our Affordability Suite and saw an average m-o-m growth of 133% in conversions.

This is only the start, and we aim to support insurance penetration with PayU’s EMI Integration. Also, empower insurance businesses and help IRDAI achieve Goal 2047.

The post Aligning PayU’s product suite for insurance to achieve IRDAI’s Goal 2047 | PayU EMI appeared first on PayU Blog.

PayU is the preferred payment partner for the biggest travel players

Over 10+ online travel aggregators are integrated with PayU’s Affordability Suite. PayU’s integration has helped them clock a ~30% month-on-month GMV growth via EMI options alone in 2022. Owing to the present affordability trends, travel brands are actively opting for EMI and BNPL options. This not only helps increase conversion but also fuels growth.

For instance, India’s biggest travel aggregator, with an average monthly traffic of 45 million, has shown continuous growth in GMV of 25% (month-on-month) using EMI options under PayU’s Affordability Suite.

Other PayU products leveraged by OTAs

With PayU’s Affordability Suite, India’s top OTAs enjoy the highest coverage of EMI options. This includes credit card EMIs from 17+ banks, debit card EMIs from 6+ banks, cardless EMIs from 6+ providers, BNPL offers from 5 partners, and many no-cost EMI options.

In addition to these, PayU provides best-in-class API solutions. PayU also offers an Affordability widget that enables our OTA partners to provide a frictionless customer experience on their websites and apps.

These include:

Click here to learn more about the product offerings.

PayU’s Affordability Suite has helped players in the travel industry unlock a new level of growth. Moreover, PayU is continuously supporting them with best-in-class product offerings to improve their customer experience.

You, too, can power your travel business with PayU’s Affordability Suite in just three simple steps. Click here to learn how.

The post PayU’s Affordability Suite Fueling Growth in India’s Travel Industry appeared first on PayU Blog.

What is EMI? 

It basically stands for equated monthly instalments. As self-explanatory as the word is, it basically allows the buyer to buy a big-ticket product or service without the requirement of immediate and complete payment. How, then, does the buyer pay? It’s simple, the buyer pays back the amount of purchase in comfortable monthly instalments instead of having to pay the entire amount upfront. This right here is the main appeal of this payment mode. Not only does the buyer get what they want but they can choose to pay over a few months, as per their comfort. 

Now, that we know what is EMI, the question that comes to mind is how EMI works to help your business.

How does EMI help you as a business?

Here are a few ways in which activating EMI at your checkout will help you boost your business: 

Increase consumer affordability: As a brand, you would provide all kinds of products or services that you can. Some are big-ticket while others are small-ticket. While most buyers take little to no time to purchase small-ticket items, they would definitely consider a variety of factors before investing in something that’s expensive. In such a scenario, the best way to enhance your customer’s affordability is to give them respite when it comes to paying you for the product. This is exactly what EMI does. This is an ideal way to delight your customers by making your big-ticket items affordable and attainable for them. 

Reduce cart abandonment: In continuation to the above point, when a buyer is unable to afford a certain product, they are bound to abandon their cart. This impacts your business in terms of conversion and revenue. But what if the buyer can choose to pay in instalments? In that case, your buyer will reconsider their purchase decision as paying in installments will help them gratify themselves and also ensure that they don’t invite financial burden as a result of the purchase.

Increase conversions: As mentioned above, once you have made yourself affordable to your buyer, conversions are bound to increase. This will ensure dipping cart abandonment rates and ensure that every customer journey on your platform is taken to completion.  

Increased revenue: Needless to say, once your conversions heighten, it automatically enhances your revenue. Now as a business that wants to prosper and sell nothing but the best, this is a win-win situation for you wherein not only does your customer become more loyal and makes repeat purchases but also you as a business witness escalating revenues. 

Now you know the many ways in which EMI activation is bound to help your business soar.

So, wait no more and activate EMI today!

Frequently Asked Questions

The post Reasons your business should offer EMI appeared first on PayU Blog.

Needless to say, this impacted sales across a plethora of brands and industries. For instance, despite the existence of heightened demand for electronic appliances, the consumer durables industry experienced 30% lower sales in 2020 as compared to 2019. 

In such a scenario, the need of the hour was to enhance affordability for the masses. It became imperative that consumers are equipped or enabled to purchase big-ticket as well as small-ticket goods based on their needs and not just affordability. This ushered in what has now become a go-to payment option for most buyers in the country: No-Cost EMI. 

What is No-Cost EMI? 

Simply put, EMI stands for Equated Monthly Installment. As is obvious from the

full form, EMI means a fixed monthly payment provided by a borrower to a creditor on a set day every month.

Coming to No-Cost EMI, it is an offer by which you pay your EMI provider only the product price, equally divided over your repayment timeline.

To give an example, if you purchase a smart TV for INR 60,000 but cannot pay the entire amount at the time of purchase, you can resort to splitting the total amount across a fixed number of months and then paying that split amount on a fixed day every month until the total cost of the purchased product has been paid for. However, you are not expected to pay any amount over and above the original price as interest. This is what makes No-Cost EMIs a lucrative payment mode for most buyers!

Growth of No-Cost EMIs in India 

With EMI as a payment mode being available on most online commercial platforms, more and more customers are opting for it. In 2020 alone, Ezetap recorded a drastic increase of 220% in the total volume of EMIs processed in 2021. 

As the interest charged from customers is completely discounted in No-Cost EMIs, it is the most preferred or chosen option. 

Here are some reasons why No-Cost EMIs have become increasingly popular amongst buyers: 

• It is easy on the wallet and keeps your liquid money for you to be used throughout the month. 
• Customers can choose the tenure over which they would want to pay back the total amount, thereby controlling the amount of money they will pay every month. 
• No extra amount needs to be paid by the customer apart from just the product price.

No-Cost EMIs become a Regular 

Hence, it is safe to say that while the pandemic ushered in No-Cost EMIs, the Indian buyer is now habitual of this payment mode. What was considered a short-term fix to grow sales amidst economic slowdown and a global health emergency, is now turning into a part and parcel of the quintessential buying behaviour of the Indian shopper. Thus, we can safely conclude that No-Cost EMI payments are not just a passé but are here to stay for a long time to come. 

What’s important to note here is that with the growing dependence of the Indian buyer on No-Cost EMIs, businesses also need to tailor their payment modes and enable No-Cost EMIs for their consumers. No-Cost EMIs have now become a key to escalating conversions and consequently garner profits for any and every business out there. So, if you are a business owner looking for measures to push sales, here is one formula you can use immediately. 

Frequently Asked Questions

The post No-Cost EMI: Passé or Popular? appeared first on PayU Blog.

However, offering your customers affordability solutions bring another set of challenges. Direct partnerships with lenders are tricky to say the least and might not be possible between each lender and merchant. There are umpteen operational processes to add to the technological challenges. More so, EMIs in general don’t have standardized technology and processes, making the process quite different for Lender A as compared to Lender B.

At PayU, we give you access to the lenders while keeping the tech and operational integrations to a minimum. We have partnership with leading lenders to give merchants access to 13 credit card EMIs, 5 debit card EMIs, and 2 card-less EMIs, and are continuing to add more lenders to give our merchants the maximum benefit of our affordability suite.

Card networks don’t support EMI as a payment option in their protocol. This might change in future given the growing demand for credit in India (and there is concerted effort at NPCI end for the same). However, the truth of the moment is that issuers have their own ways of supporting EMIs using their existing rails, making it a bespoke integration every time!

So, you have decided to offer your customers the benefit of EMI and other affordability options. Do seek the answer to the following questions before deciding on the approach.

• Does your service provider offer EMI conversion confirmation? Since the EMI conversion is done post transaction completion, one can’t be sure of whether the transaction has been converted to EMI or if there was some error.
  • PayU has set up regular EMI conversion processes with all the banks and makes the information available to the merchants through dashboard
    
    
• Does your service provider offer post order handling (refunds and cancellations)?
  Since EMI conversion is not via card network what will happen to EMI if there is refund? Will the customer still be paying the interest on the loan amount?
  • Just like PayU sends a file for EMI conversion to the bank, it sends a file for EMI cancellation as well whenever there is refund so your customers don’t need to reach out to bank for EMI cancellation
    
    
• Are your EMI rails redundant? Do you have a backup? For credit card processing you have multiple acquirers enabled to get the best conversion rates but what will happen if the only acquirer which supports EMI (we are talking about the issuers who use their own acquiring rails to support EMIs) is down? Transactions will fail and conversion will go for a toss until its back, up again
  • PayU has done direct integrations with HDFC to build alternate rails to process credit cards in case their primary switch, FSS, is underperforming, even on usual days we see 4-5% delta in performance of direct integration vs FSS route
    
    
• Is your service provider giving you the user experience flexibilities, like OTP on your page? Can you provide your customers, a payment experience similar to how it is for credit cards? For example, merchants can capture OTP on their page to reduce the network drop-offs and control the user experience. 
  • PayU allows its clients to capture OTP on their page for EMI transactions as well
    
    
• Does your service provider support auth + capture? Can you do an auth in real time and then capturing the transaction at a later stage for card transactions for EMIs transactions as well? We all know, how real buyer remorse is, and this feature could potentially save substantial amount in PG fees!
  • PayU has been the first in the market to add the support of auth + capture on EMIs transactions

Conclusion

Enabling affordability should be one of the top priorities for your business right now. Covid has led to far too many a disruption to sit on the fence and hope business would thrive. Enabling affordability options could help you acquire customers who may have dropped off because of the higher ticket size and his/her lower propensity to pay higher in current environment. All the evidence points towards affordability being one of the key drivers for buyers. With the new age products of card less credits, you can reach out to the customers in tier2/3 markets who have so far been credit underserved. With a partner like PayU, you can quickly enable these options and be confident of having one of the highest industry coverages with best success rates. So, what’s stopping you? Come, join us and be among the several hundred merchants already enjoying the benefits of PayU affordability products.

The post How PayU affordability suite can help businesses in these difficult times appeared first on PayU Blog.