PhonePe envisions massive opportunity ahead across UPI, lending, insurance, ONDC

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IANS | 26 Jan, 2023
Fintech platform PhonePe on Wednesday said the company envisions massive opportunities ahead across UPI, lending, account aggregator, insurance, and ONDC.

PhonePe recently raised $350 million in funding from General Atlantic, a leading global growth equity firm, at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion, making it a decacorn.

"General Atlantic is a really good blue chip global investor that has a long view on companies, which gives us the flexibility to be able to actually do at-scale investments in new sectors like insurance, lending, broking or ONDC," Sameer Nigam, Co-Founder & CEO, PhonePe, said.

Moreover, commenting on its relocation from Singapore to India, the company said it is here to stay for the next few decades.

"I think for the mission PhonePe is on, which is solving for at-scale financial inclusion and digitisation, the move to India was right. India is where we started and where we are focused on, and I think we will be here for the next couple of decades," said Nigam.

While moving domicile, the company faced a few challenges, to which, he said: "Our investors have paid almost Rs 8,000 crore in taxes just to allow us to come back to India. Another challenge was to convince several thousand employees that they're ESOPs are back to zero vesting at a one-year cliff, because the law in India says if you migrate, you still have to start with a new one-year cliff."

The fintech platform also expressed its future strategy, to which it says the company wants to fulfil the ambition of taking digital payments in India to a billion transactions a day, from close to half a billion, with NPCI, RBI and the entire Fintech ecosystem.

"We want to actually help scale payments with a whole bunch of new initiatives that are coming on UPI. We will be looking at launching new products and offerings be it lending on the merchant side, lending on the consumer side, a lot of new open API initiatives like account aggregator and ONDC," said Rahul Chari, Co-Founder & CTO, PhonePe.