MoneyTap rolls out platform to offer easy-to-use finance apps

Digital lending startup MoneyTap on Friday launched MoneyTap Labs, a platform to offer products that will help consumers understand and use financial services better. 

The vertical’s first offering is SuperSplit, an expense splitting product that allows consumers to create groups, add and keep track of shared expenses. It also sends payment reminders and helps settle payments on the app via UPI, a statement said.

“Labs is like a startup within a startup and allows us to move at a lightning pace. In our first launch -- the SuperSplit app -- we focused on ease of use and UPI based payments to settle expenses,” Dhaarini Vijay, senior product manager at MoneyTap Labs, said. 

“Surprisingly, our early data shows that most of our usage is coming from smaller towns in the country. We are now launching this in multiple vernacular languages to better serve the needs of the audience. This is just the first product from Labs and we have many more exciting launches lined up for the rest of the year,” Vijay said.

The MWYN Tech-run company has also been on a hiring spree to expand its engineering team and build new offerings. Apart from substantial lateral hiring, MoneyTap last year onboarded 30 engineers from colleges such as IITs and NITs, with plans to add 20 more to the list in June 2021. Some of the new hires will work on product ideas, the statement said. 

“While our core team remains razor-focused on launching new offerings that align with the evolving needs of consumers, MoneyTap Labs offers us a unique opportunity to experiment and launch transformative products,” Ashutosh Dabral, chief product officer at MoneyTap, said in the statement. 

“Gen Z is trying out non-traditional ways to achieve their financial dreams and their attitude towards money is very different. Most fintech products are focused on the transactional or functional aspect but we want to experiment a lot with interactions -- the emotional and cognitive aspect of finances,” he added. 

Founded in 2015 by Bala Parthasarathy, Anuj Kacker and Kunal Varma, MoneyTap has disbursals of over Rs 4,000 crore through its flagship product -- the Credit Line -- in partnership with banks and NBFCs. The startup has around 1,50,000 co-branded credit card users in partnership with RBL Bank. This year, the Bengaluru-based startup expects to foray into EMI cards, Buy Now Pay Later and related categories.