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Aiming to become the number one digital payments partner in the organised retail sector, PhonePe, a Flipkart group company, is forging new offline partnerships on a large scale.
Making a start with Bengaluru, the start-up has partnered with 10 national chains including Café Coffee Day, Apollo Pharmacy, Barista, Spencer’s, KFC, FoodWorld, Pai International and Goli Vada Pav.
“We want to play in all the points where money is exchanged, from mobile recharges to shopping for vegetables,” Pradeep Dodle, Head of Business Development, PhonePe, told BusinessLine .
“In the online space, in addition to Flipkart, we have partnered with over 50 online merchants including ClearTrip, Myntra, Jabong, eBay, PVR and AbhiBus. We have also partnered with 10 large national chains with many more in the offing.”
Offline too, PhonePe has been partnering with local supermarkets, department stores, pubs, restaurants and sweetshops in Bengaluru for the past six months. “The plan is to expand our local reach in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Kolkata by December,” said Dodle.
“While large organised retailers save 1-1.5 per cent of costs incurred while handling cash payments, unorganised retailers save 2-3 per cent through digital payments.”
To bring local retailers on board, the company hires contractual sales staff in every city.
PhonePe says that more than a wallet app, it is a payments container that enables multiple modes of payments via the mobile phone.
Multiple modes“Unlike most wallet apps, we don’t force our customers to use our wallet. They can pay using their UPI enabled bank accounts, credit and debit cards or PhonePe wallet. There are additional features on PhonePe,” said Dodle.
PhonePe claims it has been growing at over 100 per cent every two months this year, and that its total transactions have gone up from 5.5 million in May to 16 million in September.
This was driven by Flipkart’s Big Billion Days sale in September, resulting in an annual run rate of $3.5 billion in total payments volume that month.
Earlier this month, Flipkart invested $500 million in PhonePe, one of the largest single investment commitments in the Indian fintech payments space.
This was in addition to the $75 million that Flipkart had invested in PhonePe since acquiring it in 2015.
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