PhonePe launches $200 Mn worth ESOP for its full-time employees

Digital payments major PhonePe has launched a $200 million worth employees stock ownership plan or ESOP for its 2,200 full-time employees. According to the Sameer Nigam-led company, the plan was launched in January to enable everyone in the organization to benefit from its success.

"By having ESOPs at a minimum of USD 5,000 for all levels, we enable every employee in the organisation to participate in the wealth generation opportunity..." a company blog post said.

The development comes after Flipkart had announced a partial spin-off of its digital payments platform PhonePe in December. During the hive-off, the e-commerce giant also said that it would also enable PhonePe to carve out an ESOP program for its employees.

With over 250-million registered users and more than 100 million monthly active users or MAU, PhonePe claims to have generated over 1 billion digital payment transactions in January.

In December, PhonePe overtook Google Pay in terms of transaction volume and value via UPI. The Bengaluru-based company had recorded 902.03 million transactions worth Rs 182,126.88 crore in the month whereas Google Pay registered 854.49 million transactions amounting to Rs 176,199.33 crore during the same period.

PhonePe has also managed to double its revenue from operations which grew from Rs 184.2 crore in FY19 to Rs 371.8 crore in FY20. On a unit level, the company spent Rs 5.93 to earn a single rupee of operating revenue in FY20, improving by nearly 50% as compared to Rs 11.7 spent for the same in FY19.

In April, PhonePe’s arch-rival Paytm had announced that it would offer ESOPs worth Rs 250 crore to its high performing employees in 2020.