PhonePe crosses 1 billion transactions

PhonePe, the fastest growing payments platform owned by Flipkart, on Wednesday announced that it has crossed 1 billion digital payment transactions on its mobile app.

The company achieved the milestone in just 26 months which is the fastest ramp-up seen in India’s payments space.

According to the analyst, the achievement is a crucial milestone that reflects its rapid growth and wide adoption of Bengaluru-headquartered PhonePe across the country.

In June 2018, PhonePe crossed 100 million users, and the platform is currently responsible for driving a majority of all merchant UPI (United Payments Interface) transactions in India. PhonePe also hit an annual TPV run rate of $38 Billion last month.

Commenting on the development, PhonePe Co-founder and CEO Sameer Nigam said a billion transactions is both exciting and humbling, considering the incredible pace at which we have achieved this target and the immense opportunities ahead it presents for us.

"The growth and adoption of PhonePe have surpassed all our expectations and we thank all our users for helping us achieve this incredible milestone. We are also grateful to Flipkart, our parent company, for the constant source of support that it has provided us since inception. We would not have been able to scale up our operations this rapidly without their unwavering support,” he said.

Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy said Fintech and digital payments are one of the most promising industries in India today, and the company is delighted to see the pace at which PhonePe is growing, as well as the love it enjoys among users.

"We remain fully committed to supporting PhonePe in its goal to become the most preferred digital payments app in India, while it innovates to solve complex problems and penetrates deeper into India to support financial inclusion," said Krishnamurthy.

PhonePe has seen rapid acceptance across India including tier 2 and tier 3 cities as well. 29 States and 7 Union Territories transacted on the App during Flipkart’s Big Billion Days Sale.

Using PhonePe, users can send and receive money, recharge mobile, DTH, data cards, make utility payments and buy gold. PhonePe is accepted as a payment option across 4.5 lakh offline and online merchant outlets covering food, travel, groceries, movie tickets etc.

PhonePe recently went live with the Ola, Redbus, Mumbai Metro and Goibibo micro-apps on their platform allowing other businesses/companies to build their own exclusive stores on the PhonePe app.

This is part of PhonePe’s vision of being an open payments ecosystem, enabling businesses of all sizes to build and deploy apps on its platform with a unified login and payments experience for over 100 million users.