PayUMoney wallet is shutting down, company to focus on Citrus

All users who have balances with PayUMoney will have the option to transfer it back to their bank accounts.
PayUMoney wallet is shutting down, company to focus on Citrus
PayUMoney wallet is shutting down, company to focus on Citrus

Digital Wallet player PayUMoney is shutting down operations by the end of January. Several users using, or those who have used PayUMoney in the past received emails this morning informing them the same.

“We would like to inform you that the PayUMoney wallet issued by RBL will be closing its services on 31st January 2018. Although we are restricting loading money to PayUMoney wallet from today onwards, you can still shop with your saved cards on your favorite brands,” the email stated.

Speaking to The News Minute, Jitendra Gupta, MD of PayUMoney confirmed the news, clarifying that the company is only shutting down PayU wallet and will continue operating Citrus mobile wallet, which it acquired in 2016.

“Only the PayUMoney wallet service is shutting down because we have two wallets now after citrus acquisition and we want to continue with only one because it doesn’t make sense to run two wallets at the same time,” Jitendra said.

When PayU acquired Citrus in 2016, Citrus gave up its wallet licence as per the Reserve Bank of India's latest list of entities holding prepaid payment instrument (PPI) licences. The business was then transferred to PayU and the company was running both wallets, while the PayUMoney wallet was being run in partnership with RBL Bank.

All merchant companies offering PayUMoney wallet will now be replaced with Citrus, Jitendra said and all users who have balances with PayUMoney will have the option to transfer it back to their bank accounts. Since intra wallet transfer is not allowed yet by RBI, users can only transfer it back to their accounts and not to Citrus.

PayU will now run only one wallet – Citrus wallet, powered by PayU. Citrus as a wallet has been operational since September 2016.

Jitendra says that the shutting down of this wallet will not affect the company since it has already been toning down the PayU Money wallet business over the past one year.

“It wasn’t an area of focus for us anyway. We had less than half a million users that had balances with us and hardly 100,000 transactions happening monthly. So took a call to shut it down,” Jitendra adds.

Last year too, several users received mails from PayUMoney that the wallet was temporarily suspending operations and that users woudn’t be able to load funds into their PayUMoney wallet through any channels for a while.

However, post this, PayU clarified to Zee News that the communication was misquoted and that it was only in process of upgrading wallet backend operations and hence temporarily suspended load functionality only for users to avoid customer service issues.

Now that PayUMoney is being officially shut down, PayU will now focus on growing its payments business under Citrus Wallet and will also focus on growing its consumer credit business under its Lazy Pay offering, which is a pay later product. 

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