PhonePe breaches 5 Bn monthly UPI transactions for first time

Digital payments platform PhonePe has achieved a new milestone in October as the fintech platform crossed 5 billion (5.33 billion) transactions via unified payments interface (UPI) for the first time in the last month.

In October, UPI crossed 11 billion transactions worth Rs 17.16 trillion and PhonePe contributed nearly 47% of the total transactions volume, according to data issued by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). Value wise, the Sameer Nigam-led company recorded Rs 838,371.70 crore or Rs 8.38 trillion. Even in the previous two months i.e September and August, PhonePe registered 4.97 billion and 4.98 billion transactions respectively.

Google Pay stood at the second with 4.13 billion transactions worth Rs 5.89 trillion followed by Paytm with 1.41 billion transactions worth Rs 1.67 trillion.

PhonePe has been leading the UPI ecosystem for the last three years. The firm pipped Google Pay to the second spot in November 2020 and since then, it maintained its numero uno position in terms of number of UPI transactions.

PhonePe is also leading in terms of number of users on the platform. The firm recently claimed that it has 50 crore (500 million) registered users and more than 3.7 crore (37 million) merchants on its platform. On the other hand, Google Pay marked 150 million users across 40 countries including India in April this year. Recently, Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma also said that the company may reach 500 million payments users and 100 million merchants soon.

Meanwhile, PhonePe has expanded into financial services such as insurance, mutual funds, stockbroking, and lending. In August, PhonePe announced its foray into stock broking with Share(dot)Market, under its subsidiary PhonePe Wealth Broking Pvt. Ltd.

The company also designated new CEOs for each vertical. Hemant Gala has been promoted to the role of CEO for the lending business while Vishal Gupta, Vivek Lohcheb and Ujjwal Jain will lead insurance, Pincode and Share.Market vertical respectively.

Since January, the company has raked in $850 million in its ongoing funding round. It has raised funds across five tranches at a pre money valuation of $12 billion. Just before the fundraise, PhonePe completed its full separation from the e-commerce marketplace Flipkart and became a fully India domiciled company.

For the fiscal year ending in March 2023, PhonePe registered a 77% jump in its revenue to Rs 2,914 crore. According to the company, its EBITDA for the payment business stood at negative Rs 1,755 crore in FY23 as compared to Rs 1,612 crore in FY22.