Flipkart’s PhonePe claims to have 100 million registered users

Bengaluru: Flipkart’s mobile payments arm PhonePe claimed that it now has 100 million registered users on its platform, while indicating that its total transaction volumes have also received a boost over the past two quarters, after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) made it mandatory for digital operators to get their customers to comply with know-your-customer (KYC) norms.

PhonePe’s total transaction volumes have more than doubled over the past two quarters, Sameer Nigam, co-founder and CEO of PhonePe, said in an interview. PhonePe declined to share figures on the number of active customers on its platform.

“Post the mandatory-KYC process, our volumes have witnessed a boost. We want to keep up the current momentum, with our new category launches that are coming up over the next few months,” said Nigam.

PhonePe also said that it processes roughly 1 million offline transactions every month, while its daily online transaction numbers have gone up to 2 million per day. PhonePe aims to touch 5 million daily online transactions by December this year, Nigam added.

Nigam also claimed that PhonePe is now the largest digital payments platform in terms of total transaction volumes, although Paytm still remains the clear market leader, according to latest figures. PhonePe said its annual total payments volume (TPV) run rate currently stands at $20 billion.

Paytm, owned by One97 Communication Ltd, said in March that the number of Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, transactions on its platform touched 68 million in February, which is up 33.3% from 51 million transactions in January. According to the last available figures provided by Paytm, their annual TPV run rate stands at $23 billion.

Nigam also continued to question Paytm’s leadership position in India’s digital payments business, as he has repeatedly in the past.

In March, PhonePe had taken a swipe at Paytm, questioning the latter’s claim of being the largest player on UPI, escalating a war of words between India’s two biggest consumer internet firms that count Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. as a common investor.

In a blog post written at the time, PhonePe had termed Paytm’s claim of being the biggest payments network on UPI as “unidimensional” and “misleading”, and claimed that broad-based adoption of UPI has not happened on Paytm yet.

In January, in a tweet on microblogging site Twitter, Nigam had indicated that Paytm’s volumes on UPI had been inflated by Re1 cashbacks. Nigam later deleted the tweet.