Flipkart bets on payments, biometrics and loyalty ahead of IPO push plans

The Walmart-owned e-commerce giant is expanding into biometrics, credit and loyalty programmes to boost growth, improve margins and strengthen customer engagement

Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce platform by market share, is pushing deeper into payments and financial services as it seeks new revenue streams and tighter margins ahead of a potential initial public offering (IPO) by next year or later. The Walmart-owned company is betting that improvements in payment success rates, biometric authentication and loyalty programmes can simultaneously drive top-line growth and reduce costs — a dual mandate that reflects the pressures facing a maturing consumer internet business.

 

Gaurav Arora, vice-president, payments and SuperCoins, Flipkart, said payments have become one of the company's top three or four growth levers, with every one-percentage-point gain in payment completion rates translating directly into equivalent top-line growth. He is also working to extend the company's SuperCoins loyalty programme beyond Flipkart's own platforms — into ride-hailing, aviation and other high-frequency categories — in an effort to build what he describes as India's leading loyalty ecosystem.

 

Flipkart Internet, the marketplace arm of the company, reported revenue of ₹20,493 crore in FY25, a 14 per cent increase over the previous year. Net losses narrowed 37 per cent to ₹1,494 crore, according to regulatory filings with the Registrar of Companies. India's e-commerce market could nearly triple to between $174 billion and $214 billion by fiscal 2030, from about $70 billion in fiscal 2025, according to ICICI Securities.

 

Flipkart accounted for an estimated 50-60 per cent of industry gross merchandise value (GMV) and led the market in monthly active users, with roughly 220 million to 240 million users, according to the same report.

 

The company's GMV reportedly stands at an estimated ₹1.75 lakh crore (about $21 billion) for FY25. The broader Flipkart Group, including subsidiaries such as Myntra, achieved $30 billion in GMV in calendar year 2025, up from $15 billion in 2020.

 

Arora said payments directly affect both revenue and profitability, and that an IPO is “just one milestone” in a broader efficiency journey.

 

“Payments directly impact both top line and bottom line. Every 1 per cent improvement in payment success rate almost directly translates into a 1 per cent increase in top line — that's growth,” he said.

 

Asked whether the fintech vertical is nearing profitability, Arora said it plays both roles: supporting growth by enabling transactions and affordability, while contributing to the bottom line through transaction volume and value created for lending and banking partners.

 

Arora said Flipkart focuses on two strategic pillars: selection — ensuring every payment method works seamlessly across counterparties — and affordability, pursued through co-branded cards and on-the-spot credit lines via lender partnerships.

 

Despite appearing routine, Arora described the payment stage as “a very high-anxiety step in the funnel”, one where ensuring completion in a no-physical-interaction environment is essential to building customer trust.

 

Flipkart is betting on biometric authentication as the next major shift in how customers pay. Arora said OTP-based authentication, while a significant early innovation, has increasingly become a target for fraud — ranging from social-engineering scams to malware that intercepts one-time passwords. The company is therefore focusing on biometrics through partnerships with PayU and Axis Bank, with the ambition that a large share of repeat customers will adopt biometric payments over time. OTPs, he said, are unlikely to disappear entirely and may instead become a backup authentication method.

 

Based on Flipkart's early observations, removing the OTP authentication step has improved payment success rates by 700-800 basis points. About 9-10 per cent of users drop off at the OTP stage due to poor network connectivity, delayed delivery and app-switching — a figure Arora described as significant.

 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a complementary role. Arora said Flipkart uses AI to detect and prevent fraud at scale while minimising false positives that could block legitimate users. The company is also using AI to recommend the most relevant payment instrument for a given transaction, while preserving customer choice.

 

Looking ahead, Arora said the rise of agentic commerce will require payments to become nearly invisible within conversational and AI-driven experiences — and that biometrics are central to making that possible.

 

“While interacting through a chat interface, a user can simply authenticate via fingerprint or face ID to complete the transaction, without needing to enter an OTP or switch contexts,” he said.

 

Addressing concerns that the growth of credit-on-UPI, micro-credit and buy-now-pay-later offerings could lead to over-leveraging among lower-income consumers, particularly in Tier-II and Tier-III markets, Arora said the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has taken steps to mitigate such risks. He said the regulator is building more unified platforms that give lenders greater visibility into a customer's financial profile, enabling more informed lending decisions. Arora added that the RBI has also ensured that lending remains a regulated activity while strengthening the underlying information infrastructure — measures he said would help address concerns around potential debt traps.

 

On loyalty, Flipkart is working to make SuperCoins a ubiquitous currency that rewards customers wherever they transact, rather than only on its own platform. The company has partnered with Uber, allowing customers who link their Flipkart accounts to earn 4 per cent SuperCoins on every ride. Flipkart has also expanded the programme to airline partners, including Air India and Etihad Airways, and plans to continue growing the ecosystem.

 

Outlining his priorities for the next one to two years, Arora said the company's ambition is to build India's leading loyalty ecosystem. In payments, Flipkart will continue working closely with banks, payment aggregators and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to drive innovation through collaboration.