India’s UPI infrastructure story is largely settled. 10 billion transactions in a single month. Every bank, wallet, and fintech is plugged into the same rails.
That’s the problem.
When everyone has UPI, no one has an advantage in payments alone. Transaction success rates are converging. Cashback percentages get matched within weeks. Indian fintech has quietly built itself into a commodity trap – and the exit isn’t another feature. It’s how the product feels to use.
Features Are Table Stakes
Users don’t feel the features. They feel flows.
A payment that settles in 1.2 seconds versus 1.8 seconds isn’t a conscious decision. What users notice is whether the app feels like something they want to open or something they have to open. That distinction sounds soft. It isn’t. It’s the difference between a habit and an app that gets replaced the moment a competitor offers ₹50 more cashback.
Zomato and Swiggy ran functionally identical services for years – same restaurants, same delivery windows. What built loyalty wasn’t the menu. It was how ordering felt. Fintech is arriving at the same crossroads.
Smoothness Is Trust
When an app is well-designed, users complete actions faster and face less doubt. In fintech, doubt is churn.
When earning a reward is immediate and visible, the system feels honest. When redeeming is frictionless, the product feels like it was built in your interest. Every friction point does the opposite – it creates a moment of hesitation that compounds quietly into disengagement.
Over $16 billion in loyalty points go unredeemed globally every year. That’s not a reward problem. That’s a design problem.
Habit Is the Only Moat
Good design, applied consistently, builds habits. And habit is the one thing that’s genuinely hard to copy.
The behavioural arc isn’t complicated: an app someone enjoys using gets opened more. Return visits create reward accumulation. Accumulated rewards create a reason to redeem. A redemption experience that actually delivers – without friction, without the user feeling like they’ve been sent on a treasure hunt – closes the loop and deepens the relationship.
Each step is a design problem as much as a product problem.
The infrastructure era of Indian fintech is largely won. The experience era is just beginning. The products that define the next decade won’t have the longest feature lists. They’ll be the ones that made paying feel like the start of something – not the end of it.
Views expressed by: Bhargav Errangi, Founder, POP
