With 1 M daily transactions in November, has PhonePe finally beaten BHIM?

On Wednesday, Flipkart-owned payment app PhonePe announced it processed over one million transactions, worth over Rs 100 crore, daily in the month of November.

This takes the total volume of transactions processed on the PhonePe platform in November to 33 million. The company also said it processed Rs 40,000 crore in payments within 14 months of its launch.

In absolute numbers, the platform has seen a whopping 8,200 percent growth in terms of payments volume, when compared with November last year, the company said.

For December last year, the company said it had clocked about 1.1 million transactions.

In May, PhonePe said it clocked close to 5.5 million transactions, of which 3.5 million was through UPI, and the rest on card and wallet. In June, this number grew to 6.5 million transactions on the platform.

The most used case for this growth can be attributed to the increase and growth in online merchant, bill payment, and peer-to-peer transactions.

Speaking on this, Sameer Nigam, Co-founder and CEO, PhonePe said:

“In line with the national agenda of Digital India, we are constantly innovating to bring more use cases to our platform, and becoming the one-stop payments solution for all our customers. We are humbled to hit the million-transactions-a-day milestone in such a short span of time. We are currently processing INR 40,000 Cr worth of digital payments annually, and are targeting to double this metric by March 2018.”

Further, PhonePe mobile app has been downloaded by over 55 million Indians so far, the firm said.

At present, PhonePe has over 60,000 online and offline merchants across segments such as movie ticketing, food delivery, pharmacies, groceries, travel portals, and petrol pumps. It recently introduced new categories like Credit Card Bill Payments, and Gift Cards on the mobile app.

To spread its offline merchant acceptance network, PhonePe launched its indigenously-designed Point of Sale (PoS) device powered by Bluetooth technology. Costing just $10, the device does not need internet connectivity for the merchant. [Read more here]

In October, e-commerce marketplace Flipkart announced an investment commitment of $500 million in PhonePe.

PhonePe had then said it will use the investment to scale up its technology, reach, and offering.

 BHIM vs PhonePe

Earlier, when asked about facing the heat from a government-endorsed entity like BHIM, Sameer had said,

“I think of BHIM as both a competitor and a facilitator. Their presence makes the UPI network real because if the government and the Prime Minister say that this is an offering to mainstream India, I know that UPI is not shutting down anytime soon. In the long run, it is only going to help us.”

Bharat Interface for Money or BHIM was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on December 20 last year, and runs on UPI.

According to representative data from the Reserve Bank of India, the total number of UPI transactions in the country stood at 104.8 million in November, while representative data shows total UPI transactions in the country stood at 76.8 million in October.

According to NPCI data released in October this year, the total volume of UPI transactions on BHIM stood at 7.63 million during the month and 7.60 million in September.

PhonePe claims its total transactions stood at 16 million in September, and 22 million in October. However, it was unclear as to how many of these transactions were over UPI and through other payment options like credit cards, debit cards and others.

What may be worrisome for PhonePe at present is the prolific success of Google's payment app, Tez. Just this month,Tez app said it has 12 million users in India. Further, Caesar Sengupta, Vice President of Google’s Next Billion Users announced 70 percent of UPI transactions in the month of November were completed through Tez.

The competition indeed just got tougher!