PhonePe users can now directly make IRCTC bookings through its app

Bengaluru-based payments company PhonePe on Thursday announced that it has strengthened its association with the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) by entering into an app-in-app partnership. As a result, the platform’s 100 million-plus users will now be able to book their train tickets directly through the PhonePe app.

This integration will also allow users to pay conveniently for their bookings using UPI, credit, debit cards or their PhonePe wallet.

Commenting on the partnership, Rituraj Rautela, Head of In-app Platform, PhonePe said,

“We are very excited with this addition to our in-app portfolio. While users could already pay for their bookings on the IRCTC platform using PhonePe, they can now directly book tickets from the PhonePe app also. We are continuously evolving and innovating towards building a hassle-free eco-system for our 100 million users and the association with IRCTC is another step in that direction. Our aim is to create a unified login and payments experience across all important consumer use cases especially in the space of travel.”

The deepened association with IRCTC is another step towards achieving PhonePe's vision of enabling businesses of all sizes to build and deploy apps on the platform. PhonePe is rapidly adding partners in the travel, hospitality, ticketing and food segments to its micro-app platform and is already live with key micro-apps including Ola, redBus, Mumbai Metro and Goibibo (flights and hotels).

The Flipkart-owned payments company has been working on its in-app strategy since the start of this year, when it went live with bus booking platform, redBus.

Further, in an earlier interview, Co-founder and CTO Rahul Chari told YourStory that the in-app strategy to enable the payments ecosystem (earlier known as web store) was part of their plan since day one.

Apart from redBus and IRCTC, the platform has also gone live with cab aggregator Ola; onboarded Goibibo for flight bookings; OYO and Treebo for hotels as well as partnered with Faasos and eat.fit for food.