(The Weekend Insight) - From Carts to Credit: How India’s E-commerce Giants Are Becoming Fintech Titans

In today's analysis, we will explore how India's largest e-commerce players are evolving into financial powerhouses. We'll trace their journey from offering simple cashback and wallets to now driving full-stack financial ecosystems - from credit cards and loans to insurance and wealth management. We'll examine why this convergence is happening, who the major players are, what strategies they're using, and how this shift is reshaping India's fintech landscape.

E-commerce in India was once a game of discounts. Flipkart offered cashbacks. Amazon gave “Lightning Deals.” Snapdeal threw in freebies. Every player was trying to get the next 10 million users online. But as the race matured, another game began in the background - control over how people pay.

Because whoever controls the payment layer, controls the checkout. And whoever controls the checkout, controls the customer.

That’s why the most strategic pivot in Indian e-commerce over the past five years has been this subtle but relentless shift into fintech. Not through flashy acquisitions or overnight launches, but through small iterations such as co-branded cards, EMI options, buy-now-pay-later schemes, and then full-blown credit lines, insurance offerings, and eventually, wallets and UPI handles.

The trigger was threefold. First, UPI made frictionless payments a habit. Second, Jio’s cheap data brought over 500 million Indians online. Third, COVID accelerated digital adoption at every level. This trifecta gave e-commerce players two things: a massive user base and a habit loop of online transactions. Fintech was the natural extension.

Let’s take Amazon. What began as Amazon Pay, a closed wallet, evolved into a financial mini-universe. They quietly rolled out Amazon Pay Later, then onboarded 4 million users to their ICICI co-branded credit card, which offered 5% cashback and fast approvals. Recently, they acquired a BNPL startup Axio, not for headlines, but for strengthening its financial capabilities. Amazon can now offer seamless checkout financing, term loans, and innovative credit products without relying on external NBFCs.

Flipkart followed a similar arc. Flipkart Pay Later reached 15 million users. They tied up with Axis Bank for a credit card, revived PhonePe integration (before the split), and offered EMI options for everything from grocery to fashion. In March this year, Flipkart secured an NBFC license which allowed the integration of lending services across its e-commerce platform and fintech app Super.Money, creating a comprehensive financial services ecosystem. This isn’t only fintech as a service - it is fintech as a moat.

Reliance and Jio Platforms went even deeper. With the Jio ecosystem - JioMart, JioCinema, JioFiber, and now Jio Finance - they integrated data like no other. Jio Payments Bank gave them a licensed entry point. MyJio offered loans and insurance. Jio UPI was launched, and experiments began around savings, credit scores, and retail underwriting. Jio’s model wasn’t “we’ll offer finance” - it was “we’ll own the rails.”

Then came Tata Neu. Initially panned as a clunky super app, Tata Neu slowly stitched together its verticals - BigBasket, 1mg, Croma, Air India, Tata Cliq - and layered a single rewards currency: NeuCoins. Then came Tata Neu HDFC co-branded cards, insurance products, EMI payments, and credit line integration. The ambition? Build India’s first real cross-brand super-fintech app.

Why are they all doing this? Because the unit economics of commerce are brutal. Discounts are expensive. Logistics are expensive. CAC is never-ending. But finance is sticky, which is both high-margin and recurring. And best of all, it runs on data you already have.

E-commerce companies know when a user abandons cart. What they searched for. When they last bought detergent. Which device they’re using. Whether they click on insurance. Whether they pay rent digitally. This level of behavioral underwriting beats most NBFCs and banks.

Plus, banks spend crores acquiring users. E-commerce firms already have them. Offering credit cards, pay later, insurance or SIPs is just a matter of plugging into a partner API and nudging users contextually. Buy jeans? Here’s 3-month EMI. Buying a fridge? Here’s theft insurance. Booking a flight? Add trip cancellation protection. It’s seamless. And that seamlessness creates dependency.

The numbers reflect this. As of 2024:

• India’s BNPL market is at $21.9B, set to hit $35B by 2030

• Credit card penetration is just 5.5%, vs ~35% in the US

• Digital lending overall is projected to reach $350B by 2025

And this is just the beginning. Add mutual funds, SIPs, gold savings, insurance bundling, and soon, e-commerce apps look more like full-stack fintech platforms. Not “fintech-enabled commerce,” but “commerce-enabled fintech.”

It’s also a defensive move. PhonePe, Paytm, and Google Pay are eating into checkout. Ola, Zomato, and CRED are becoming neobanks. If Amazon and Flipkart don’t own the financial layer, they risk losing the customer before the cart.

Internationally, parallels exist. Apple is offering savings accounts and credit cards. Grab in Southeast Asia became a BNPL and micro-lending powerhouse. But the Indian playbook is more layered. It involves partnerships with NBFCs, integrations with UPI, adherence to RBI guidelines, and hyper-personalization using commerce behavior.

In 2024, Flipkart’s marketplace and financial services arm posted overall revenue of ₹17,907 crore. Amazon Pay reportedly had 100M monthly users. Jio Financial is being spun off and listed separately. Tata Neu claims over 20 million monthly transacting users. This is not experimentation. This is full-stack expansion.

But this evolution isn’t risk-free. Regulation is tightening. The RBI has already flagged concerns on BNPL products, digital lending standards, and KYC norms. Many e-commerce firms are dependent on NBFC partners for backend. Any change in regulation affects product rollout.

Also, these fintech arms must prove profitability. The reason Paytm got punished post-IPO was not just valuation, but unclear monetization and mounting losses. Investors are now smarter. They want contribution margins, not vanity metrics.

Still, this convergence is inevitable. India’s e-commerce players will not remain just sellers of goods. They are becoming financial operating systems - platforms where users browse, buy, pay, borrow, insure, invest, and save. The ones who can do this without overwhelming the user will win. Not with the best tech, but with the best timing, regulation management, and ecosystem orchestration.

Because in this new world of Indian fintech, the battle isn’t for market share. It’s for habit share.

The fusion of e-commerce and fintech isn’t unique to India - but what makes the Indian context so compelling is the scale, speed, and structure of this convergence. Globally, there are many parallels, but none with the same diversity of players, regulatory clarity, and digital adoption tailwinds as India.

Take the case of Apple. With Apple Pay, the company slowly embedded payments into its hardware ecosystem. Then came the Apple Card (backed by Goldman Sachs), and now Apple Savings. But Apple’s fintech foray is tightly controlled, Apple-first, and slow-moving.

Compare that with Grab in Southeast Asia. Grab didn’t just become a ride-hailing giant; it pivoted aggressively into fintech with GrabPay, micro-lending, insurance, and even wealth management. Its user data from rides and food delivery became underwriting gold. Grab now holds a digital banking license in Singapore.

In China, Alibaba’s Ant Group is perhaps the most extreme example of this integration. What started as an escrow system for Alibaba’s marketplace ballooned into a fintech juggernaut - until regulators stepped in and halted its IPO.

The lesson? E-commerce players across the globe inevitably eye finance, but their regulatory environment and tech-first DNA determine how far they can go.

In India, the sandbox is ripe. The RBI has created frameworks for digital lending, e-KYC, account aggregators, and now retail CBDC pilots. The regulatory pathways exist, albeit cautiously.

And investors are paying attention for good reason. Fintech, globally and in India, still commands richer multiples than traditional e-commerce. Every financial layer embedded into a commerce flow opens up the door for better margins, predictable recurring revenues, and significantly higher customer lifetime value.

Flipkart, for instance, has seen Flipkart Pay Later scale to over 20 million users. Analysts are now valuing its fintech arm as a distinct revenue stream altogether, independent of core commerce. Jio Financial Services - carved out of Reliance and listed separately on the exchanges - debuted with a bang, enjoying a sharp rise in public market interest. Amazon didn’t waste time either. Instead of building its own BNPL stack from scratch, it simply acquired Axio (earlier Capital Float) to bolster its Amazon Pay Later offering.

Globally, Bain & Company estimates embedded finance will be a $7 trillion opportunity by 2030. And if there's any market poised to leapfrog legacy financial structures, it’s India with its billion-plus consumer base, fully digital public infrastructure stack, and fragmented access to credit and insurance. The soil is fertile, and the seeds have already been planted.

Still, growth hasn’t come without its thorns. The RBI is no longer taking fintech excesses lightly. Recent interventions have sent a message across the ecosystem. Digital lending platforms are now required to publicly disclose their NBFC partners and clearly define grievance redressal mechanisms. Wallets that operate on UPI rails are being asked to comply with stricter KYC norms and transaction limits. Even co-branded credit cards - once a grey zone of joint marketing - are being examined to ensure banks don’t circumvent risk guidelines. The regulator isn’t anti-innovation, it’s just increasingly pro-transparency.

Then there’s the trust factor. Consumers are warming up to the idea of buying insurance or getting a loan from a shopping app. But if these platforms begin to exploit their data firehose for aggressive cross-selling, especially to users who might not understand the products fully, a backlash will be inevitable. This becomes particularly risky if default rates start climbing, or claims begin to get denied.

E-commerce companies are also discovering that financial services come with their own DNA. Fraud detection at scale, managing NPAs when you expand into underserved cohorts, RBI reporting protocols - none of this was in their original playbook. What looks elegant on a product roadmap often unravels in collections and compliance workflows.

Building the tech stack is the easy part. Building the pipes - the underwriting engines, NBFC partnerships, risk dashboards, and collections infrastructure - is what separates the flashy apps from sustainable fintech operations.

So who ultimately wins the fintech race?

This isn't about slapping a Pay Later button on a checkout page or offering mutual funds in a tab that users never open. The true prize lies in reshaping customer behavior - building financial rails that don’t just support transactions, but start and end within the same platform. That’s when users stop thinking of credit or insurance as a separate service - and start treating it as a natural extension of commerce.

Picture this: a user buys groceries on JioMart, pays via Jio UPI, earns reward points, and uses those to pay the next month’s phone bill. Or someone books a flight on Amazon, adds travel insurance at checkout, pays via Pay Later, and tracks claim eligibility - all within the same app. Or a Tata Neu customer buys a refrigerator on Croma EMI, checks loan status inside Neu, and earns NeuCoins to redeem on BigBasket. These aren’t futuristic scenarios. They’re live workflows, happening now in pockets across India.

This is the final form of platform bundling - commerce, finance, and loyalty woven into one experience.

As the convergence deepens, the lines between a shopping app and a neobank will blur. Five years from now, what we call “fintech” may not be run by traditional banks or standalone startups. It may be led by the very platforms that already dominate our checkouts, wallets, and purchase histories.