PhonePe targets D2C route, more merchant revenue

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

PhonePe has built a full-stack payments solution for ecommerce platforms and, armed with an in-principle approval from the Reserve Bank of India for the payment aggregator business, is scaling up its presence in online commerce.

For the Walmart-backed company, which has around 500 million registered users availing of Unified Payments Interface payments and 37 million offline merchants using QR codes, ecommerce is the next target.

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Gaming platforms like Dream11 and MPL, hotel chain Oyo and railways ticket booking platform IRCTC have already started working with PhonePe. It is generally going after large ecommerce players, gaming startups and direct-to-consumer brands (or new generation ecommerce players as it calls internally).


With established players like Razorpay, PayU, Paytm and Cashfree not being allowed to onboard new customers in the online space by the RBI, a large opportunity has opened up for PhonePe.

Also read | PhonePe among top fintech companies with $1.3 trillion total payment value: Walmart

Initially PhonePe offered UPI-based checkout for its own users on select ecommerce platforms, but now the idea is to offer all forms of payments across cards, UPI, wallets and net banking.

Additionally, the company offers a fraud-detection tool, named Guardian, for its enterprise merchants and a quick check-out experience for verified online shoppers, named Express.

“PhonePe is running discount offers to get large online merchants to start using its own