FamPay eyes UPI for survival

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Editor's note: It’s crunch time for FamPay. At a recent board meeting, faced with mounting pressure from investors to showcase revenue and curtail expenses, founders Sambhav Jain and Kush Taneja realized that their pocket money app may not survive for long if they don’t quickly make changes to its strategy and business model. So, they made three decisions. First, to immediately stop all growth initiatives to scale the pocket money app. Second, to let go of a bunch of highly paid senior executives. And third, to fast-track the company’s transition into a UPI-based consumer payments platform, no longer exclusive to teenagers and their parents.   To this end, the company has laid off at least four senior members of the leadership team, according to three executives aware of the matter, who asked not to be named. They are Shobhit Gupta (head of engineering), Brijesh Bhardwaj (head of product and growth), Fatema Raja (design lead) and Aditya Binakiya (product lead). All four were high-profile hires made by the firm over the last two years from WhatsApp, Dunzo, Gojek and Twitter, respectively. It was news …