Indian payments giant PhonePe is poised to expand into areas such as finance by introducing 1,000 app services

Indian payment giant PhonePe has set his sights on its in-app merchants to achieve a new round of growth. Within a year of the launch of this category of services, the acceptance rate and usage rate of merchants within the app have increased significantly.

In 2018, the apps of Indian Taxi service giant Ola and Redbus, the largest bus booking company, will allow users to book taxis and car services through the PhonePe app. Today, with the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) ecosystem, the number of applications that can service through the PhonePe platform has increased to 35. PhonePe aims to introduce 1000 in-app services by the end of 2019.




Rituraj Rautela, head of the PhonePe application platform, said:“We are actively building our platform into an open ecosystem by introducing cross-cutting application services in food delivery, hyper-local delivery, travel and entertainment. We are also accelerating the integration process of various application services. Over the past 10 days, we have consolidated the service content of 10 applications. ”

PhonePe is now targeting the fast-growing gaming space with a recent partnership with digital gaming startup Mobile Premier League in bangalore, India.

“So far, 60% to 70% of users are using types of services such as travel and commuting on the PhonePe platform, but that is changing and we expect the most used services to be transformed into types such as food distribution, gaming and ultra-localization by June 2019” Rautela said. 

The number of transactions made through the PhonePe platform is growing by 50% a month. However, PhonePe hopes to further lower the average value of transactions to attract more micro-transactions through its app.

With a current number of 100 million users, PhonePe is breaking through the payment sector into a wider range of financial services, including mutual fund investments and digital gold. The company is competing with local rivals Paytm and us tech giant Google for market share in payments based on the UPI system.

Earlier reports suggested that PhonePe was planning to gradually split from its parent company Flipkart in an effort to raise as much as $1 billion from outside investors. That goal is now within reach.