PhonePe starts first Indian digital payment interactive geospatial platform

The Walmart-owned digital payment firm said its Pulse platform reveals digital transaction habits of over 300 mn Indians at a district level

Walmart-owned digital payments firm PhonePe has launched PhonePe Pulse, India’s first interactive platform with data, insights and trends on digital payments in the country. The PhonePe Pulse website showcases more than 2000 crore transactions by consumers on an interactive map of India. With over 45 per cent market share, PhonePe’s data is representative of the country’s digital payment habits.

PhonePe also launched the Pulse Report, an in-depth study on the evolution of digital payments over the past 5 years. The report also has insights about how digital payment adoption across India has evolved since 2016, and includes detailed geographical and category-specific trends.

“Pulse is our way of giving back to the digital payments ecosystem. When we started PhonePe five years back, we struggled to get reliable granular data on digital payments trends across the country,” said Sameer Nigam, founder and CEO of PhonePe. “We had promised ourselves that if we are successful and gather enough data on our platform, we would open it for anyone who wants to get deeper insights on the Indian payments industry. We built PhonePe Pulse because we can, and crucially because we should help unlock opportunities for others to build in India.”

The insights on the website and in the report have been drawn from two key sources - the entirety of PhonePe’s transaction data combined with merchant and customer interviews. The report is available as a free download on the PhonePe Pulse website.

This new product is relevant to multiple ecosystem stakeholders including the government, policymakers, regulatory bodies, media, industry analysts, merchant partners, startups, academic institutions and students. The rich data set along with insightful trends and stories can be used by these partners to understand consumer and merchant behavior and identify new opportunities for growth.

PhonePe Pulse is a first-of-its-kind product in India and is the culmination of months of research and collaboration by a cross-functional team. It included corporate communications professionals, business analysts, marketers, designers, writers, engineering and business teams from across the company.

“We strongly believe that a core contributor to our success has been our philosophy of building open platforms that allow all participants in the ecosystem to grow. We are an extremely data-driven company with our data platforms and knowledge stores being at the core of a lot of systemic decisioning,” said Rahul Chari, co-founder and CTO of PhonePe. “PhonePe Pulse is an extension of our open platform approach to the information we have garnered at scale with the view of democratizing the access to this data for the benefit of other stakeholders in the ecosystem. The end product today is only the start and we hope others take the same approach to data sharing and transparency.”

PhonePe Pulse website analyzes digital transaction habits of over 300 million Indians to show how India is paying, down to the district level. With over 45 per cent market share, PhonePe’s data is representative of the country’s digital payment habits. It is relevant to a wide range of stakeholders including the government, policymakers, analysts and merchants.

Digital Payments is a pan India habit. Over 300 million Indians from 19,000 pin codes now use digital payments. About 4 out of every 5 PhonePe monthly active users are from Tier-2 and 3 cities, and 2 out of every 3 users are from Tier-3 towns. The amount of money that travels digitally in India is more than the GDP of 21 countries.

Most Indians are exploring sending money online. Over 63 per cent of first-time transactions on the PhonePe app are to transfer money, confirming that this category acts as the initial hook for customers to download a UPI app. PhonePe registered 182 per cent growth in transactions for this category and 72 per cent growth in customers between Q2 2020 and Q2 2021.

The Tier-2 and 3 towns in India are making big leaps into digital investments and insurance categories. PhonePe’s insurance offering is largely purchased (more than 2/3rds) from customers in Tier 3 cities and beyond. Gold was purchased from over 99 per cent pin codes and Mutual Fund investments from over 95 per cent pin codes in the country. About  Rs 30,000 is the average Mutual Funds investment of Patiala users, which is 2.5x of Mumbai.

A PhonePe user visited and paid at a whopping 75 Petrol Pumps in 13 States last year. This represents the scale of digital payments in India. PhonePe is live at several tens of thousands of fuel merchants across the country, with a very strong year on year growth.

The Pulse report also said that the pandemic has made many store merchants and customers choose digital payments over cash. “In fact, the top 5 cities leading in-store transactions will surprise you - Bengaluru, Nashik, Aurangabad, Visakhapatnam and the Rangareddy District,” said the report.

For instance, 13,456 digital payments were accepted at Victory Bazaar in Kakinada from 6,815 customers during the lockdown. About 14,142 digital payments were accepted at a dairy shop in Delhi NCR from 740 customers during the lockdown.

PhonePe was started in 2015, to solve payments at scale and enable digital inclusion for over 100 crore Indians. Over 22.4 billion transactions have happened to date on the platform. The firm now has over 314 million registered users and has coverage across 19,098 pin codes in the country. The company which competes with players such as Google Pay, Paytm and Amazon Pay said it has 46 per cent UPI (unified payments interface) market share. It does annualized total payment volume of over $473 billion.