PhonePe, a digital payments platform, based out of Bengaluru, is likely to commence offline KYC for its users.
The development came to light when Sameer Nigam, CEO at PhonePe, said that the Flipkart-owned company is planning to start a pilot to do physical KYC of customers using its existing agent base of 8,000 people. These agents are already working for the company to onboard offline merchants on PhonePe.
The e-payment companies had a debatable concerned issue for KYC process through Aadhaar in 2018 when the Supreme Court of India brought down Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act. Since, then the online payment companies have been seeking help of the government authorities to come up with an alternative root for the KYC process using Aadhaar as the medium.
PhonePe which was acquired by Flipkart in 2016, was founded by ex-Flipkart executives Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer. Since then Flipkart has invested about $500 million in PhonePe.
It is a financial technology company, headquartered in Bangalore, India. It provides an online payment system based on Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which is a new process in electronic funds transfer launched by National Payments Corporation of India.
Thus, there are several digital transaction platforms in India that compete with the likes of PhonePe- Paytm, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, Yono, Mobikwik, etc.