PhonePe goes live across one million offline shops in eastern India

PhonePe, the country's leading digital payments platform, has emerged as a live payment option across one million offline shops in the eastern region.

The payments platform has consolidated its presence in the eastern cities of Kolkata, Siliguri, Ranchi, Patna, Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Dhanbad, Bokaro and Guwahati. With a network of 80,000 offline shops, Bhubaneswar leads Phone Pe's presence in Odisha where over 157,000 outlets accept it as a payment option. Likewise, Patna with 80,000 offline merchants leads PhonePe's  presence in Bihar, which boasts of 190,000 offline shops touched by the digital payments provider. In Jharkhand, 176,000 shops accept PhonePe as a payment option. The eastern state of Odisha accounts for a sixth of Phone Pe's merchant base in the east.

Vivek Lohcheb, Head, Offline Business Development at PhonePe said, “PhonePe is one of India’s largest payments platforms with more than 9 million merchants across 300 cities — over 65 per cent of our transactions come from Tier 2 and 3 cities. In line with our endeavour to revolutionize digital payments for both users and merchants, we are excited to reach the one million merchants milestone in eastern India, one of the fastest-growing regions for us. We have always adopted a partnership model with all our merchant partners and gone beyond being just a payments service provider. Our inter operable QR codes allow merchants to accept consumer payments from any UPI app and not just PhonePe alone. For the merchants, this makes the digital payment acceptance process simple and reconciliations seamless. All a merchant needs is a feature phone with internet connectivity to get started. We also provide them with visibility on our app where over 185 million users can discover merchants in the vicinity that accept PhonePe, effectively increasing footfalls to their business.”

PhonePe currently has over 9 million offline shops in its network pan India and is aiming to more than double this base to 20 million offline shops by the end of 2020.

PhonePe continues to expand into newer geographies enabling even local kiranas to accept payments from consumers through digital payment mediums like UPI, credit cards, debit Cards and wallets. PhonePe has also introduced a ‘Stores' tab on the app enabling hyper-local discovery of partner merchants for users. Keeping in mind the daily working capital requirements of merchants, PhonePe offers instant settlements along with zero processing fees on UPI transactions. PhonePe has a merchant app as well called 'PhonePe for Business' that facilitates end-to-end control on the payment process for merchants including transaction confirmation and reconciliation.