PhonePe Makes Digitization Push For 25 Million Merchants Across India, Including Kirana Stores

While speaking to the nation on August 15, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said that as many as six lakh villages in India will be connected with the optical fiber network, within the next 1,000 days. This will bring broadband internet to villages that still potentially rely on spotty mobile network coverage to access digital services.

PhonePe is a leading digital payments platform in India, and currently has more than 230 million registered users. It 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.

In June this year, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant had said that India is pushing for as many as 1 billion digital transactions per day, from the current three billion transactions in a month. In a report earlier this month, RedSeer Consulting had said that India’s digital payments landscape is expected to be as large as Rs 7,092 trillion by the year 2025. In 2019-20, the digital payments market was pegged at around Rs 2,162 trillion, which means we are looking at a three folds increase in the next few years. At the same time, the Payments Council of India (PCI) and Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) say that India will contribute as much as 2.2 percent to the world’s digital payments market by the year 2023 with the value of digital transactions expected to be around $12.4 trillion globally by thee year 2025.

In July, UPI payments recorded an all-time high in transaction numbers—as many as 1.49 billion transactions were clocked for the month, according to data by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). These transactions were worth Rs 2.90 trillion. This was up from Rs 2.61 trillion recorded in June, and Rs 1.46 trillion recorded in the same period in 2019.