PhonePe eyes South East Asia, Middle East for its global forays
Digital payments major PhonePe is looking to set up retail payment operations in new geographies, including Southeast Asia and the Gulf region, two people aware of the company's plan told ET.
Places like Singapore, the Gulf region and some countries in Europe are on the agenda, but the plan is still in the early stage and implementation will be done slowly, they said.
“The plan is to apply for a payment licence in these geographies and set up retail payment operations there,” said one person, requesting not to be named. «The expertise that the team has built scaling up business in India will be handy there and there is a large opportunity as payments get digitised in these places.»
An email query sent to Walmart-backed PhonePe remained unanswered.
The development comes at a time when the National Payments Corporation of India is spearheading the adoption of Unified Payments Interface outside India in new geographies like Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, Singapore and France.
PhonePe offers UPI payments to Indian travellers visiting many of these places. Although the company is focused on Indian tourists, its larger plan is to set up payment systems for local residents in those geographies too.
While several Indian payment companies, such as Juspay, FSS and Pine Labs, have operations outside India, many are merchant payment processors. PhonePe wants to be a consumer facing payments player, looking at digitising offline and online merchant payments.
“The PhonePe leadership will earmark the budget needed to capitalise
