PhonePe doubles down on financial services; CEOs appointed for lending, insurance and wealth businesses

By integrating with PhonePe PG, customers and merchants can now enable ‘Credit Line on UPI’ as a payment method, reducing cart abandonment and boosting sales, Phonepe said.

Fintech major PhonePe has made a series of role reorganisations within the firm including naming chief executive officers for its lending, insurance, and broking businesses as it doubles down on financial services offerings.

Hemant Gala who was part of the core team at PhonePe building the Payments business is now appointed as the CEO of Lending business, the company said in a media statement on November 7.

Apart from personal loans to its users, PhonePe has also kicked off digital lending pilots for merchants.

Vishal Gupta who is part of the founding team and played multiple leadership roles across product, design, risk, and customer experience, has been promoted to the role of CEO for PhonePe’s insurance business.

Ujjwal Jain was recently promoted to the role of CEO of Share.Market and will be heading the company’s Wealth and Broking business. Previously, Ujjwal founded WealthDesk which was acquired by PhonePe.

PhonePe announced on August 30 its entry into the stock broking business with the launch of its app called "Share.Market" which will compete with the likes of Zerodha, Groww and Angel One.

“As we look to the future, we felt that this is also a great time to redesign the org and elevate some of the key PhonePe executives to take on larger roles in the group. I would like to congratulate them as they take on their new roles, and help build multiple exciting new businesses for PhonePe Group.” Said Sameer Nigam, founder and CEO of PhonePe.

Vivek Lohcheb who was heading PhonePe’s offline business has now been promoted to the role of CEO for Pincode.

In April, PhonePe ventured into the hyperlocal e-commerce app space with ‘Pincode’  in April. Built on top of the Open Network for Digital Commerce network, it was the first buyer-side app on ONDC and is currently available only for customers in Bengaluru

Crosses 500 million users

PhonePe, today announced that it has crossed 500 million lifetime registered users on its platform. 

“When we started PhonePe, I had never imagined that we would get to 50 crore registered users in such a short span of time. It feels almost surreal, Yet, we have achieved only 50 percent of our vision statement of bringing digital payments to 100 crore Indians,” Nigam said.

This comes after PhonePe’s Sameer Nigam said at the Moneycontrol Startup Conclave held in July that the firm will cross 500 million users by the end of 2023.

"We will likely cross 500 million lifetime users of PhonePe by Diwali this year and we already touched 300 million active users on an annual basis... This is a superset of any e-commerce or even fintech category because this is payments, which is staple," Nigam said during a panel discussion with Zerodha founder and CEO Nithin Kamath at the Moneycontrol Startup Conclave on July 7.

PhonePe registered a 77 percent growth in consolidated revenue to Rs 2,914 crore for FY23 on account of market expansion and digital money transfers. The Walmart group company had posted revenue of Rs 1,646 crore in the financial year 2022.

The growth in the number of users also comes on the back of its dominance in UPI total payment value. PhonePe's UPI Total Payments Value (TPV) market share stood at 50.54 percent as of March 2023.

The company is valued at $12 billion and has processed nearly 5 billion transactions in a month for the first time in the May-July quarter.