PhonePe, a digital payment platform, based out of Bengaluru, has reached an offline merchant base to over five million, cited yourstory.
The latest development of PhonePe user base is a rapid surge from January 2019, when the total offline merchants on the platform stood at 1 million.
“We are excited to reach this milestone and are humbled by the trust shown in us by consumers as well as merchant partners. We will continue to expand our reach across the length and breadth of the country, building innovative solutions that make the process of digital payments simple, convenient, and hassle-free,” Yuvraj Singh Shekhawat, head of offline business growth at PhonePe said.
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.
While in April 2019, the company claimed that it surpassed the two-billion mark for the total payment transactions on its app. PhonePe had attributed this growth to the increasing acceptance across large and small offline and online merchants across the country.
Significantly, Paytm has announced that it was changing its cashback strategy to focus on transactions at offline retail kirana stores, other than of P2P UPI payments.
Also read: Now no cash back on P2P transactions, says Paytm.
Whereas, currently, PhonePe is present in more than 150 cities across India and continues to expand into newer geographies.
Thus, there are several digital transaction platforms in India that compete with the likes of PhonePe includes Paytm, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, Yono, Mobikwik, etc.