In the digital payment ecosystem built by the unified payment interface (UPI) in India, there is the fiercest competition among three companies, namely Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay.
Interestingly, however, all three companies face the same problem-not having enough financial support to drive their own performance growth.
Now, though, PhonePe may have a chance to stand out from the competition, as global retail giant wal-mart has pledged to invest a total of about $500 million in the company and has so far injected 7.43 billion rupees. The latest funding is from PhonePe Pvt Ltd, formerly known as FlipkartPayments, the singapore-based parent of PhonePe, according to documents disclosed by the Indian enterprise registration office.
Yes, it’s the payment arm of Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce company, which was acquired by wal-mart for a whopping $16 billion.
It is worth mentioning that the PhonePe company revealed that Kkr&co, General Atlantic, TigerGlobal Investment fund, Tencent is also likely to participate in the investment. So far, the total amount of financing for the company has exceeded Rs. 15 billion.
PhonePe currently has more than 50 million monthly active users and has been eating into the market share of the unified payment interface once dominated by Paytm. In addition, Googlepay’s market share growth rate is also cool.
In addition to online payment services, PhonePe also offers offline payment solutions for more than 1 million merchants, and is also a leader in this market area.