How money transfer app Chillr is scaling up

Peer-to-peer money transfer and recharge app Chillr plans to expand its range of services and tie-up with more banks over the next couple of months to attract users, as it sets its sight on breaking even in two years' time.

Chillr will soon launch a payment facility for enterprises as an additional revenue stream while aiming to double its base of active users and quadruple the number of transactions by March, founder and CEO Sony Joy told Techcircle.in.

Joy said that the app is recording transactions worth Rs 1.5 crore to Rs 2 crore a day and that the total transaction value since the app was launched in December 2014 has touched Rs 105 crore.

The app, owned by Mumbai-based Backwater Technologies Pvt Ltd, allows users to transfer money to their phone book contacts. It also allows recharge of prepaid mobile phones, DTH TV subscription and data cards. It is directly linked to the customer's bank account, and so eliminates the need for a prepaid wallet. All transactions are authenticated by a four-digit MPIN issued by the bank.

Joy expects Chillr, which raised $7 million late last year from investors led by Sequoia Capital, to break even during the financial year 2017-18.

More banking partners

Chillr has tie-ups with HDFC Bank, Bank of Baroda and Catholic Syrian Bank to offer its services. It hopes to bring this number to 12 by March and has already received approval from eight banks, Joy said.

While all users can receive money, only users who hold accounts with Chillr's partner banks can send money and check their account balance within the app.

Joy said Chillr will soon double the average daily transactional limit to Rs 1 lakh and increase the per-transaction cap five times to Rs 50,000. It will also add more utility payment services including postpaid mobile bills, cooking gas cylinder payments, and water and electricity bills. "The setting up of nodal accounts with banks for this purpose is in its last leg," Joy said.

Number of transactions

Currently, the average number of daily transactions is about 25,000. Chillr is targeting to increase that number to one lakh a day by the end of March 2016.

"The focus is on increasing the number of transactions rather than breaching a certain total transaction value as each category of services within the app has different average transactional limits and value," said Joy. He added that the average usage of the app per active user has risen to four-five times a month from two-three earlier.

According to Joy, the app has about 8 lakh total users. Of this, active users are in the range of 4-4.5 lakh. By the end of this financial year, Chillr aims to have 10 lakh active users on the platform.

Merchant apps

As a pilot initiative, Chillr is all set to launch payment facilities for merchants by the end of this week in Pune.

To begin with, around 50 merchants will have the app installed and this number will be increased to 150 by the end of January.

The new service would allow the users to use the Chillr app as a mode of payment with these merchants.

A feature called 'Near me' will help users identify merchants who accept Chillr as a mode of payment in the vicinity. Merchants, in turn, would offer a discount of 10-25 per cent to Chillr users, said Joy.