India’s leading digital payments platform PhonePe has now crossed the 250 million user mark. PhonePe also reports 100 million monthly active users and clocked 2.3 billion app session in October. This comes at a time when digital transactions are at an all-time high. PhonePe says that in October, they registered 925 million transactions on the app while September saw 750 million transactions. The digital platform is seeing strong numbers from Tier II and Tier III towns in India, with more than 70% transactions coming from users in those towns. PhonePe says they saw 835 million UPI transations in October which translates into a market share of more than 40% of the total UPI transactions for the month. According to the NPCI data, October saw as many as 2.07 billion UPI transactions across all platforms, the highest ever since UPI was launched.
PhonePe is now available as a digital payments option at 13 million merchants in 500 Indian cities. “We are on a mission to make digital payments a way of life for every Indian citizen, and our next target is to cross 500 million registered users by Dec 2022. In line with our brand ethos of "Karte Ja. Badhte Ja", we continue to launch new & innovative products for every strata of Indian society, as well as enable digital payment acceptance across every merchant in every village and town in India,” says Sameer Nigam, CEO and Co-Founder of PhonePe. This is part of the digitization push that the platform has embarked on which should see 25 million offline merchants adopt the PhonePe digital payments platform across India.
According to the data by the National Payments Corporation of India, the UPI transactions clocked the 207 crore (2.07 billion) transaction mark in October. These transactions are worth as much as Rs 3.3 lakh crore. There has been a steady rise in UPI transactions, with a reported 180 crore UPI transactions completed in September valuing to as much as Rs 3.29 lakh crore and 161 crore transactions in August. This steady rise in UPI transactions are due to a variety of factors, which includes more online purchases and payments being done as people stay indoors due to the coronavirus pandemic and also the recent online sales on various shopping platforms including Flipkart and Amazon. UPI is one of the digital payment methods, including credit and debit cards as well as netbanking and mobile wallets.
We had reported earlier that with merchants including Kirana Stores getting access to the PhonePe for Business app, it will give them the ability to use the completely digital payments process with vendors and customers. PhonePe wants to complete this roll-out by December 2021, and believe this digitization push across more than 5500 talukas across India will help create more than 10000 jobs. This comes as the government of India continues to push for digital payments to reduce the reliance on cash for payments, and also is pushing forward with the digitization plans across the country.
PhonePe is competing with digital payment platforms including Paytm, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Mobikwik and Airtel Payments Bank, to name a few, in India. At this time, PhonePe offers a variety of services, including bill payments, utility payments, in-store payments, money transfer, paying for your credit card bills, and also a wider spectrum of financial services including investments such as Mutual Funds, gold savings as well as insurance.
A few weeks ago, PhonePe had expanded the mutual funds options by adding 7 new mutual fund categories. These new categories are Large cap, Mid and Small cap, Diversified Funds, Index Funds, Hybrid - Aggressive & Dynamic Asset Allocation, Debt, Liquid and Tax Saving Funds.
Towards the end of October, the Google Pay app went offline on the Apple App Store and iPhone users faced transaction failure issues for a few days as Google fixed certain issues with the app to improve transaction success rates.
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