PhonePe eyes 500 mn merchants on 'Switch' by year-end

Flipkart-owned PhonePe is betting big on 'PhonePe Switch', which allows users to transact across various food and shopping apps without actually having to download them, to drive growth in transactions and usage on its platform.

The digital payments platform said 51 apps are already live on 'Switch' and the company expects this number to touch 500 by December.

"Switch provides a one-click entry point to a world of apps. Users can login to these apps without downloading them. We have 51 apps currently and we expect the number of merchants to touch 500 by year-end," PhonePe Chief Executive Officer Sameer Nigam told PTI.

He added that Switch facilitated about 3-4 million transactions in July-August and the company is confident of this to rise to 10 million monthly transactions by December.

Nigam said every year, companies spend millions of dollars on app development, customer acquisition and battle high uninstall rates.

"Switch enables merchant partners to integrate their existing PWAs (progressive web apps) or mobile-sites to the platform, and instantly reach out to over 60 million monthly active PhonePe app users," he said.

PhonePe is focused on bringing more partners across categories, including travel, mobility, food, hyper-local, shopping and entertainment on the platform. Partners like Ola, redBus, Goibibo, Myntra, Delhi Metro, and Grofers are already a part of 'PhonePe Switch'.

Overall, PhonePe saw 380 million transactions on its platform in August, as compared to 290 million in the month of June.

"We are witnessing strong growth in transaction volumes on our platform. Our aim is to take it to 500 million transactions a month by December-end," Nigam said.