PhonePe rejigs top management; appoints lending, insurance vertical leads
The re-organisation comes in the wake of PhonePe’s new businesses, including its entry into ecommerce and stock broking with Pincode and Share Market app.
Walmart-backed payments and financial services firm has announced a strategic re-organisation, rejigging the portfolios of its top management.
Hemant Gala, who has been heading payments, banking and financial services at the fintech, will now hold the charge of the CEO at PhonePe’s lending business.
Further, Product head Vishal Gupta has been elevated to the role of CEO for PhonePe’s Insurance business.
Both the senior executives—former Flipkart leaders—have been with the company for the last seven years and were a part of its founding team, holding multiple positions across product, design, risk, and customer experience to build and scale the payments and merchants business.
“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 Founder and CEO Sameer Nigam.
The re-organisation comes in the wake of the company’s new businesses, including its entry into ecommerce and stock broking with Pincode and Share Market app, an online payment gateway, loan service for merchants in partnership with NBFCs and banks, a Point of Sale (PoS) device, besides account aggregator services.
The company has roped in its Vice President of Offline Business, Vivek Lohcheb, and promoted him to take charge of the new app—Pincode—as its CEO. Lohcheb has been with the firm for almost the last six years.
Meanwhile, Ujjwal Jain was recently promoted to the role of CEO of ShareMarket and will be heading the company’s Wealth and Broking business.
“These executives have played a pivotal role in driving PhonePe’s growth, and in their new roles, they will be responsible for the end-to-end management of these businesses, while also owning the strategy, and growth for their respective verticals,” Nigam added.
The fintech decacorn reported a 77% jump in its consolidated revenue to Rs 2,914 crore in FY23.
Boasting a UPI market share of 50.54% (in terms of total payments value) as of March, PhonePe India Pvt Ltd, which houses its payments business, recorded an operating loss of Rs 1,755 crore in FY23 compared to Rs 1,612 crore the previous year.
However, the payment subsidiary turned EBITDA positive on an adjusted basis (excluding the ESOP cost), a metric used by new-age firms.
Cross 50 crore-user mark
The fintech giant on Monday announced that its UPI payments app has crossed 5 crore registered users since its launch in August 2016.
“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% of our vision statement of bringing digital payments to 100 crore Indians,” said Nigam.
With this, the company now claims to have every one in three Indians using its app, making it the first Indian internet company to have reached this scale globally, it said.
Edited by Kanishk Singh