Bengaluru-headquartered payments platform PhonePe on Thursday announced that it has grown its offline merchant base to over 1 lakh in Bengaluru. PhonePe enables merchants to accept payments from consumers through multiple instruments like UPI, credit cards, debit cards and wallets. PhonePe also offers multiple solutions which makes it easy for merchants to start accepting digital payments. These include integrated payment solutions, QR codes and POS devices. 

Yuvraj Singh Shekhawat, Head – Offline Organised Business, PhonePe, said, “Our offline business has shown phenomenal traction in the last one year. We are now live at most organised retail outlets across grocery, fuel, medicines and account for 6 -10% of all non-cash transactions."

While Bengaluru is leading the offline expansion for PhonePe, the company is also seeing tremendous acceptance and growth across other key markets including Delhi and Mumbai. 

Vivek Lohcheb, Head – Unorganised Business said, “PhonePe has always adopted a partnership model with all its merchants and gone beyond being just a payments service provider. PhonePe's QR allows merchants to accept consumer payments from any UPI app and not just PhonePe alone. The PhonePe QR solution thus allows the merchants to put up 1 QR for facilitating UPI payments instead of dealing with multiple partners."

Some of the key offline merchants across Bengaluru that accept payments using diverse PhonePe solutions are More, Spencers, McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, Croma, Pantaloons, and Sapna Book House, among others.

With over 10 million monthly transactions in the offline space, PhonePe has witnessed phenomenal growth in 2018. PhonePe is expecting this number to grow 4-fold to about 40 million transactions by March 2019.