India’s largest e-commerce marketplace Flipkart on Thursday announced an investment commitment of $500 million for its group company PhonePe, a payments platform. This is one of the largest single investment commitments in the Indian fintech-payments space, and the commitment adds to the $75 million worth of infusions Flipkart has made in PhonePe since acquiring it in 2015.
Digital paymentsThe fintech ecosystem in India, especially payments, is undergoing a paradigm shift with surge in mobile internet usage. Accordingly, market research shows that the country’s digital payments sector is estimated to grow to $500 billion by 2020, representing around 15 per cent of the GDP, up from around $50 billion last year.
Commenting on the development, Sameer Nigam, co-founder and CEO, PhonePe, said:“The investment will be used to scale up our technology platforms and expand our merchant network and consumer base rapidly. We have been growing at over 100 per cent every two months this year, and this investment will help us maintain the same aggressive growth rate for the next two years.
PhonePe is strongly committed to helping the Indian government in realising its Digital India vision, and achieving its target of 25 billion digital payment transactions by next year.”
PhonePe, which has over 45 million installs, has recorded over 16 million transactions on the back of the successful Flipkart Big Billion Days festival sale in September.
The fintech firm’s annual run rate, as a result, touched a new high of $3.5 billion in terms of Total Payments Volume (TPV) in September. This ramp-up is the fastest in the Indian digital payments space, the company claimed.
“Fintech and e-commerce are among the most visible faces of a new Digital India that is powered by the youth and technology, and both are set for outstanding growth,” said Binny Bansal, Group CEO, Flipkart. “PhonePe is a critical part of our overall strategy at Flipkart to build a comprehensive ecosystem for our customers. We’re fully committed to make PhonePe the most preferred digital payments app in India.”