Building for Bharat: PhonePe CTO Rahul Chari on leveraging tech for billion-plus impact

Building products at a scale to serve India’s population requires a combination of design thinking and technology at scale, noted Rahul Chari, Co-founder-CTO, PhonePe. 

He believes such an integrated approach is essential for creating products that effectively serve and engage a billion-plus user base.

“Normally, it's always about technology at scale.. but [we need to] think of the product strategy for the population and then determine how we can actually use technology effectively.. because that's the only way to actually build at the level of scale for a billion-plus population,” Chari said at a keynote speech at YourStory's India Tech Leaders Conclave 2024.

Reflecting on the fintech giant's product development philosophy, Chari explained, “We had a very simple philosophy of taking every consumer in India through the journey of send, spend, manage and grow. And this is something that we have stuck with through our nine-year journey as PhonePe.”

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One of the key pillars of the fintech firm’s overarching strategy is to never take away consumer choice, he added. 

“Until PhonePe came along, there was always a walled garden of instruments of choice, being it a debit card or a credit card or a wallet or some stored value. Each of these was disparate. What it really meant was the consumer choice to use any form of digital currency was not really coupled to a single platform… When you are actually catering to an extremely diverse population, trying to actually force choice versus ensuring that every choice is catered to is a big difference,” he explained. 

In March, Indus Appstore, PhonePe's Android-based app store, reached over one million instals within its first month. The company attributed its rapid growth to a varied demand for categories such as finance, games, and social media. Serving primarily Tier II cities, it supports multiple languages and prioritises community feedback for user satisfaction.

“India is actually extremely aspirational. The trial drivers that you get in India for any use case, I don't think you get anywhere in the world. But at the same time, if you actually lose them, you lose them much faster than anywhere else in the world. And I think that's one of the key things that we've seen as a data pattern,” he added.  

According to Chari, when building services at a large scale, finding the least common denominator, such as supporting infrastructure, becomes extremely important. For Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the denominator would be debit cards as they are the simplest and most widely accessible method of payment. 

“UPI was actually love at first sight. I always call it because it's pretty much foundational to whatever we have built, and while we always cater to being a payments container… what we realised is that the least common denominator for the country when it comes to payments has to be direct debit from a bank account. And having a unified broking layer on top of that, is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Chari explained. 

The company has also heavily invested in automation, which enables it to handle approximately 270 million transactions daily. “In terms of tickets that get raised and the number of tickets that get resolved through automation, we are at 96% [success rate],” he added. 

Further, as technology becomes more ubiquitous and standardised, Chari believes the real differentiator lies in performance and scalability.

“At the rate technology is getting commoditised and expanding with LLM models and AI, and more … my personal belief is that the true IP (intellectual property) or differentiator becomes purely performance and scale. Our IP is to be able to continue to deliver the level of performance that we deliver, keep improving it, while we are operating at population level scale,” he proclaimed.