We'll spend $50 million on developing, marketing LazyPay: Abhijit Bhattacharya

Digital payments company PayU India that launched its deferral payment 'LazyPay' in April will spend $50 million for the development and marketing of its latest feature over the next few years. With this, the company aims to get over five million users on board in the next one year. The LazyPay feature is aimed at providing convenience to customers who transact digitally repeatedly in small value transactions on online portals. Abhijit Bhattacharya, head marketing - consumer business, PayU India, spoke to Collin Furtado on their marketing campaign using stand-up comedians, features of the scheme and spends.

What was the idea behind the launch of LazyPay?

This is across multiple apps and platforms. There are probably 15 wallet options, 5 UPI options, etc. People are going crazy to understand what is the difference between mobile wallet and UPI, what is the cashback that you will get, net banking passwords, OTPs, etc. The payment process has become a lot more complex. So if I am person who is making recurring digital payments such food ordering, paying for cabs, booking movie tickets, etc. Every time I do that I have to remember my netbanking password or go to the OTP route or put in money in your digital wallet. So we came up with an option where all you have to do is click and finish your order. What it does is that it gives you a credit of X amount of money where you can do multiple transactions within that limit, without having the hassle of going through the OTP, passwords, etc. So you keep stacking your small transactions and you pay in one go at the end. This is a feature across multiple platforms such as Zomato, where among the payment options you will have a 'Pay Later' option.

So is there any interest charged for people using LazyPay?

There is none. But there is a credit limit which varies from person to person. And the credit limit will be based on the credit limit that the customer has. We have a huge repository of data of transactions among people which gives us a fair understanding of the credit history of the person basis we put the credit limit to that. That credit limit is something that we are starting with, it may or may not exist as we go ahead.

What is the marketing plans for this? And the spends that you will put?

Most of our users are digital consumers, so our campaign is primarily on digital. That does not mean we will not be on offline mediums. We wanted to take the route of content led advertising, which is very rarely done in India. Assuming a 30 second video the first 20-22 seconds is pure content. It has nothing to do with the product, nothing to do with the features, the next 5-6 seconds will be product linked. Now we will be having multiple videos. Stand-up comics have a large say in influencing the digital audience today. So instead of using them sporadically, we used stand-up comics to lead our campaign. They are the faces of our campaign and will lead the entire campaign.

Is the campaign on traditional mediums going to differ from the digital campaign?

There will be a slight bit of television that we are doing. I will say that it is not a full rung television plan that we will be doing, but there will be enough TV presence for sure. We are pretty confident that it will have high recall on TV as well. The other medium that we are focusing on is below the line advertising.

What are the marketing spends on the Lazy Pay campaign?

For the overall Lazy Pay product we have allocated a budget of $50 million over the next couple of years and this would include the marketing spends as well. This would be for two years. The initial campaign burst will be for eight weeks as we have eight videos and will space them out. We also have various categories to cater to.