PhonePe not focusing on curtailing market share on UPI: Sameer Nigam

CEO Sameer Nigam said that the company continues to add new users and is also ensuring the acceptance of PhonePe across merchant partners in the country.

“We believe that our mission to digitize payments in India is a noble one, and we will not stop doing so until we are not allowed to do so anymore […] We are not focusing on curtailing market share and are continuing to add customers while also ensuring the acceptance of PhonePe across merchant partners in India,” said Nigam.

NPCI last November had said that a cap of 30% will be imposed on overall transaction volume clocked by a player starting 2021. Third party payment providers will also have a period of two years to comply with this directive.

Bengaluru-based PhonePe has picked up speed in recent months and has registered successive growth in total number of UPI transactions on its platform. It also toppled market leader Google Pay in November..

PhonePe processed close to 975.5 million transactions in February, widening the gap with competitor Google Pay by 147.6 million transactions.

Close to 54% of overall UPI transactions clocked in February on PhonePe are merchants payments, the company said.

Nigam said PhonePe continues to have the highest success rate on UPI.

“Based on the NPCI data itself, we have the highest end-to-end success rates in UPI payments and we believe that overtime product always wins and we are starting to see the early signals of user preference,” Nigam said.

Currently, PhonePe commands close to 42% of the market in terms of UPI payments, while Google Pay’s share has reduced from 43% in November, its peak, to 36% now .

PhonePe has close to 280 million registered users, currently of which 110 million are monthly active users of the platform, the company said. The company has added close to 6.5 million merchants in the last 8 months and claims to have 17.5 million merchants pan- India, at present.