DigiPay CEO: We Are the Leading Player in Iran's Fintech and Landtech

Snapp Pay is a monopolist

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Omid Torabi, CEO of DigiP, in a conversation with Ambassador Arjan, said that this company is the number one player in Iran's fintech and landtech market based on gross transaction volume (GMV) and aims to reach one billion dollars in credit sales this year. Referring to the competition with Snappy, he said: "We are in the same boat with this company, but Snappy wants to monopolize." According to Torabi, the default rate of DigiP was below 2%, which is a very good number.

In response to the question whether buying on credit is helping the consumer or encouraging debt, Torabi started by comparing Iran and the world. "Everywhere in the world, people pay for concert tickets with credit, gas, and even the cost of water," said the CEO of DGP. "We have been really behind in this area and we are still behind."

According to him, on average, around 50% of purchases in the world, whether with a credit card or with BNPL, are made on credit, and in America this figure is around 80%, although there it is more with credit cards. Torabi emphasized that in Iran and some countries such as Saudi Arabia, BNPL has been a large and voluminous entrance to the credit market; Because in places where there was no credit card before, this newer tool took its place.

The CEO of DigiP said about the interpretation of credit purchase: "We are naturally in favor of the second interpretation and all our efforts are to make credit and credit purchase a possibility available to people, in any type of purchase and at any moment of their lives." By the second interpretation, he meant changing the payment method and a new lifestyle, against the first interpretation, which relates credit purchases to weak purchasing power.

He also said about the purchase of Homayun Shajarian's concert ticket with BNPL: "Why is everything in Iran, unlike the world and even our neighboring countries, always in cash?" According to Torabi, this possibility was denied to the Iranians for various reasons, the most important of which was sanctions, and now the right question is why we achieved it so late.

The CEO of DGP did not provide statistics on the share of essential and non-essential goods and said that analysis in a nascent market with large numbers leads us to wrong conclusions. He explained that last year, about 32,000 people made purchases from Shoprak, almost all of which were in cash. If half of it was to be credit, the monthly figure should be around 1,500 to 2,000 hemat.

"The total credit purchase with BNPL, credit card and what we call sticky consumer credit, I think now is not more than 30 Hamat per month," said Torabi. Even with optimism, together players like DigiP and SnapP sell a maximum of 40 units per month on credit, which means a difference of about 50 times."

According to him, credit buying has spread to all categories and has seen a lot of growth in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) as well. Torabi said: "He sees this trend as a sign of moving towards the entire household basket rather than towards essential goods. DigiP's mission is to bring credit out of digital goods and into people's daily lives.

Turabi introduced DGP with three numbers. The first number is one billion dollars of credit sales. He said: "Since the beginning of the year, we had aimed to reach one billion dollars in credit sales this year, and despite the fluctuations in the exchange rate, we are still loyal to this goal."

The second number is 150. The CEO of DGP explained that with the implementation of the artificial intelligence transformation project, at least 150 people have been recruited in areas such as the contact center, contract management, production, testing and quality control.

The third number is also one. Torabi said: "I believe that we are now the number one player in fintech and landtech in Iran."

According to the CEO of DigiP, the number of monthly active users of this company is about 12 million people, about 10 million people have credit, and the number of people who make credit purchases per month has exceeded 2 million people.

The CEO of DigiP considered DigiCard as an innovation in the field of bank cards and said: "This is the first card in Iran's banking system that people buy." He added that 600,000 cards have been provided to the people so far.

"We had to build that trust," Turabi said of the criticism that the track was slow. He explained that DGP conducted a step-by-step dialogue with the regulator, especially the Central Bank, to prove the safety and lack of risk of the plan. According to him, for the first time on this scale, a bank card is connected to the wallet and gives cashback to people.

In response to the criticism that the company should have provided a credit card, Torabi said that DigiP's goal is to connect DigiCard to BNPL, and this issue is being pursued by the Ministry of Economy in the form of "Maple Plan" or "Co-acceptance of the credit network". "It's no longer a question of technology or technical capabilities," he said. The issue is to be able to turn this project into a successful project within the banking framework and laws and regulations of the country." Also, the connection of Digicard to Sarwat wallet is going to be unveiled today.

According to the CEO of DigiP, about 300,000 people have at least one transaction with this card every month, and for about 200,000 people, DigiCard has become an everyday card. He said of the half-percent cashback: "No one else now gives the same half-percent cashback on every transaction, even buying gas at the gas station?" According to Torabi, cashback was 5% when buying from some merchants, and now it has reached 14% with the cooperation of merchants. He announced the company's goal of reaching one to two million cards by the end of the year.

"I'm proud to say that throughout this time, even though we've gone through two wars and several crises, our default rate has always been below 2 percent," Turabi said of the default rate. This figure is a wish for our banking system. He considered the connection to large platforms and being data-oriented as the main factors of this situation and said that the large and loyal community of customers increases the company's risk-taking ability.

According to him, it experienced spikes in the warspace of user defaults due to system issues, such as systems outages and OTPs, but then fully recovered. DigiP's goal is to reach 2%, while the actual numerical performance is lower than this.

The CEO of DGP said about the company's behavior with people in the war: "Unlike our competitors, we did not block or reduce people's credit in the war." He added that in BNPL's product, from January to the end of May, no follow-up was done to collect the installments and the fines were forgiven. According to him, in the banking facilities, DGP played the role of the bank's guarantor and agent.

"This connection has not been broken and we have not been separated," Torabi said about the affiliation with Digikala Group. He explained that DigiKala owns about 50% of Iran's e-commerce and DigiP has grown tremendously on this platform in the past year. According to him, DigiCala is still the largest merchant and the most important DigiP data reference for validation.

The CEO of DigiP said that the company's credit consumption ratio is now about 60:40: "Still 60% of our credit consumption is in DigiCal and about 40% in other platforms." He described this 40%, considering the volume of digital goods, initially unattainable and now very important.

"We're in the same boat as SnapP," Turabi said of the competition with SnapP. We have common interests in issues such as systematic risk, credit culture, and communication with the regulator and banks, but the problem started when one of our friends and competitors said to get off so that I can monopolize."

According to him, in addition to taking legal measures to show the "ugliness" of SnapP's behavior, DigiP has also attracted important merchants in the field of competition. Turabi mentioned Bonnymode, Pierre Cardin, Jean West and Bodyspinner in the fashion sector, Alibaba, Flytoday and Jobama in the travel sector, and Ocala, Haft Store, Dailymarket and Janbo in the FMCG sector.

The CEO of DigiP said about artificial intelligence: "We now answer almost 60% of people's calls with artificial intelligence." He added that about 6,000 to 7,000 calls are answered daily, and the goal is to answer all calls by artificial intelligence by the end of the year. According to him, with this project, an unique architecture has been built, which is supposed to be used in the user interface and customer experience.

Torabi also informed about financial, legal and commercial agents to review contracts and said that several thousand to ten thousand contracts are signed with merchants every month and artificial intelligence manages them, and only the final signature is with the CEO, which also goes towards digital signature.

He said about the payment agent, this agent knows the limitations of the country's payment network, customer limitations, and the infrastructure of DigiP and can make a decision about transfer, installment payment, or purchase. "The bottom line for me is that it has to solve a problem," Torabi emphasized. He didn't think it would work to build a robot just to ask a customer, saying, “We're not in such a rush to shout that we've done so-and-so in artificial intelligence; Mostly, we want to really shed skin with artificial intelligence and become another company.”