Fintech Friday: PhonePe – building India’s largest transaction platform
27/11/2020
Perspective
Rahul Chari, Co-founder and CTO of PhonePe, spoke with Efma’s Boris Plantier about how his company is revolutionizing payments in India.
What led to the creation of PhonePe?
When we started PhonePe four years ago, the idea was to build an ecosystem centered around payments providing users with speed and security at every transaction touchpoint, while also enabling businesses to reach a new and large consumer base. We pioneered the growth of UPI-based payments as we foresaw its power over wallets in changing the payments landscape of the country. In a short span of time, PhonePe has established itself as a leader in the Fintech industry and revolutionized payments in India. The journey has been incredible to say the least, not just in terms of the growth in the number of users and transactions, but also in realizing the social impact payments and financial services can create.
With our money transfer and bill payment offerings, wide merchant acceptance, both online and offline, the ‘Switch’ platform that aggregates various merchants on the PhonePe app itself and our foray into financial services with Gold and Mutual funds, it is safe to say that we are truly on the way to realize our vision from three years ago.
Could you present PhonePe's offer?
Our vision is to build India’s largest transactions platform, anchored around payments. This entails creating an open ecosystem with cross platform technology that lets consumers, merchants and financial service providers to engage or transact with each other.
We started by envisaging the customer journey revolving around money to be in four phases - send, spend, manage, and grow. We were the first non-banking app to launch on UPI, solving holistically for money exchange of all sorts (i.e. ‘send’).
We then opened avenues for consumers to ‘spend’ via a vast acceptance network based on the principle of an open ecosystem - both offline and online.
Now customers can ‘manage’ their money via tax saving and gold mutual funds. And finally, we have launched a multitude of investing options to allow our customers to ‘grow’ their money.
We have also built a merchant platform PhonePe Switch allowing multiple partners to host their apps and reach out our vast customer base, partnered with leading BFSI players and launched India’s first interoperable QR code for merchants.
What's coming next for PhonePe?
We are currently focused on the India market as the digital payment segment is going through a massive growth cycle. Going forward, our focus will be on growing our user base to 500 million from the current 230 million, launching more products in the Financial Services space (currently we have Mutual Funds & Insurance products), growing the acceptance of digital payments across every corner of the country, we plan to digitize 25 million stores by the end of next year and partner with more brands for our Switch platform (currently we have over 220 partner apps).
When we started PhonePe four years ago, the idea was to build an ecosystem centered around payments providing users with speed and security at every transaction touchpoint, while also enabling businesses to reach a new and large consumer base. We pioneered the growth of UPI-based payments as we foresaw its power over wallets in changing the payments landscape of the country. In a short span of time, PhonePe has established itself as a leader in the Fintech industry and revolutionized payments in India. The journey has been incredible to say the least, not just in terms of the growth in the number of users and transactions, but also in realizing the social impact payments and financial services can create.
With our money transfer and bill payment offerings, wide merchant acceptance, both online and offline, the ‘Switch’ platform that aggregates various merchants on the PhonePe app itself and our foray into financial services with Gold and Mutual funds, it is safe to say that we are truly on the way to realize our vision from three years ago.
Could you present PhonePe's offer?
Our vision is to build India’s largest transactions platform, anchored around payments. This entails creating an open ecosystem with cross platform technology that lets consumers, merchants and financial service providers to engage or transact with each other.
We started by envisaging the customer journey revolving around money to be in four phases - send, spend, manage, and grow. We were the first non-banking app to launch on UPI, solving holistically for money exchange of all sorts (i.e. ‘send’).
We then opened avenues for consumers to ‘spend’ via a vast acceptance network based on the principle of an open ecosystem - both offline and online.
Now customers can ‘manage’ their money via tax saving and gold mutual funds. And finally, we have launched a multitude of investing options to allow our customers to ‘grow’ their money.
We have also built a merchant platform PhonePe Switch allowing multiple partners to host their apps and reach out our vast customer base, partnered with leading BFSI players and launched India’s first interoperable QR code for merchants.
What's coming next for PhonePe?
We are currently focused on the India market as the digital payment segment is going through a massive growth cycle. Going forward, our focus will be on growing our user base to 500 million from the current 230 million, launching more products in the Financial Services space (currently we have Mutual Funds & Insurance products), growing the acceptance of digital payments across every corner of the country, we plan to digitize 25 million stores by the end of next year and partner with more brands for our Switch platform (currently we have over 220 partner apps).
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