Walmart-owned fintech firm PhonePe said it has crossed 500 million lifetime registered users on its platform.<\/p>\n
With this milestone, 1 in 3 Indians are now on PhonePe.<\/p>\n
The company said it is the first Indian internet company to have reached this scale globally.<\/p>\n
This milestone has been achieved in just over 7 years since the PhonePe UPI (Unified Payments Interface) payments launched in August 2016.<\/p>\n
“When we started PhonePe, I had never imagined that we would get to 50 crore registered users in such a short span of time.<\/p>\n
“It feels almost surreal,” said Sameer Nigam, founder and chief executive officer of PhonePe.<\/p>\n
“Yet, we have achieved only 50 per cent of our vision statement of bringing digital payments to 100 crore Indians.”<\/p>\n
The firm competes with players such as Google Pay, Paytm, and Amazon Pay in the digital payments space.<\/p>\n
The firm has also elevated some of the key executives to take on larger roles in the group.<\/p>\n
These executives have played a pivotal role in driving PhonePe’s growth.<\/p>\n
In their new roles, they will be responsible for the end-to-end management of various businesses, while also owning the strategy and growth for their respective verticals.<\/p>\n
Hemant Gala has been promoted to the role of CEO for PhonePe’s Lending business.<\/p>\n
Gala has been part of the founding team at PhonePe and has worked across multiple businesses over the past 7 years.<\/p>\n
He was part of the core team at PhonePe building the Payments business from the early days and then helped seed the Financial Services businesses in the last few years.<\/p>\n
Vishal Gupta has been promoted to the role of CEO for PhonePe’s Insurance business. At PhonePe, he has been part of the founding team.<\/p>\n
He played multiple leadership roles across product, design, risk, and customer experience to build and scale the payments and merchants business.<\/p>\n
Vivek Lohcheb has been promoted to the role of CEO for the company’s e-commerce platform Pincode and will be responsible for scaling the Pincode offering across key cities in India.<\/p>\n
Previously, Lohcheb headed the Offline Business at PhonePe, where he was responsible for expanding the company’s offline merchant network and acceptance.<\/p>\n
Ujjwal Jain was recently promoted to the role of CEO of the company’s stock broking platform ‘Share.Market’.<\/p>\n
He will be heading the firm’s Wealth and Broking business.<\/p>\n
Previously, Jain founded WealthDesk and created a curated research baskets category on broking called WealthBasket to address the challenges faced by the funds and broking industry as a whole.<\/p>\n
“As we look to the future, we felt that this is also a great time to redesign the organisation, and elevate some of the key PhonePe executives to take on larger roles in the group,” said Nigam.<\/p>\n
“I would like to congratulate them as they take on their new roles, and help build multiple exciting new businesses for PhonePe Group.”<\/p>\n
The fintech startup’s UPI play gave it a boost, even as many banking and tech companies failed to tap digital payments at scale.<\/p>\n
“We got lucky as we bet on UPI (unified payments interface) before everyone jumped on the bandwagon,” said Sameer Nigam, founder and chief executive officer of PhonePe, during a recent fireside chat at the Business Standard<\/em> BFSI Insight Summit in Mumbai.<\/p>\n Later, big tech companies like Google, Meta-owned WhatsApp, and Amazon also came up with UPI-based platforms.<\/p>\n But PhonePe, according to Nigam, had the belief that it would win because it was willing to deploy a large workforce on merchant acceptance and operations.<\/p>\n PhonePe has about 10,000 employees on its rolls.<\/p>\n There also are some 20,000 people working on contract.<\/p>\n During the Covid-19 pandemic, PhonePe got about 150,000 freelancers to acquire merchants in rural India.<\/p>\n The company successfully digitised over 36 million offline merchants across Tier-II, -III and -IV towns, and beyond, covering 99 per cent of India’s PIN codes.<\/p>\n Payments were enabled through millions of PhonePe QR codes, including smart speakers installed at small businesses across the country.<\/p>\n The other important factor in PhonePe’s success, he said, was that it welcomed regulations and was comfortable with being regulated.<\/p>\n Though PhonePe is owned by Walmart, Nigam said that the retail giant’s backing only came after the firm had set up its guard rails.<\/p>\n Its investors paid Rs 8,000 crore in tax, largely led by Walmart, to allow the firm to change its domicile from Singapore to India.<\/p>\n Nigam, who founded PhonePe in December 2015, has transformed it into a full financial services platform.<\/p>\n The company also launched the Indus Appstore developer platform to confront the might of Google in the app marketplace.<\/p>\n Nigam said the company was now laying the foundation for an IPO.<\/p>\n It was also trying to bring more independence to its board.<\/p>\n