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PhonePe on Thursday announced plans to accelerate the expansion of its merchant network and take digital payment infrastructure deeper into India's towns and villages. As part of the expansion, PhonePe plans to hire more than 20,000 frontline sales personnel on its rolls over the next year. The company will also deploy more than 50 lakh payment devices over the next 12 months, including SmartSpeakers and POS devices with approximately 50 per cent of these devices in rural India, taking digital payment acceptance deeper into Tier 6 towns and rural geographies. The recently announced MDR framework allows the company to take a long view and invest in merchant expansion. Initiatives like a dedicated fund using 5 per cent of the MDR amount collected earmarked for small merchant expansion, are further catalysing these investments, especially in deep rural geographies including tier 6 towns and villages. The new labour codes introduced last year, are also enabling the company to hire faste
Digital payment authentication must move beyond passwords and one-time passwords (OTPs) as artificial intelligence-driven commerce gathers pace, a top Visa official said on Thursday. "Authentication cannot remain dependent on passwords or one-time codes designed for an earlier digital era. It must become secured by design, invisible to the consumer, and resilient against increasingly sophisticated fraud," Suresh Sethi, group country manager for India and South Asia of Visa, said at a company event. The global payments major launched its 'Payment Passkey' solution in India on Thursday. The company said VPP enables consumers to authenticate online card payments using capabilities already built into their mobile devices, including fingerprint, facial recognition, device PIN or pattern, instead of relying solely on OTPs. This helps satisfy the two-factor authentication requirement applicable in India. Sethi said the solution is built on globally accepted FIDO standards and is designed
Payments giant Visa said Wednesday that it has embedded its payment network inside of ChatGPT, empowering the chatbot to independently shop and complete transactions on behalf of its user. It means AI agents can not only recommend products but complete the purchase on the user's behalf, at potentially any merchant that accepts Visa. The payment network's previous attempts at this technological leap were confined to a single retailer or a small set of enrolled merchants. It is not OpenAI's first attempt at e-commerce. The company late last year announced Instant Checkout, which allowed ChatGPT to scour the internet for a specific item like a digital personal shopper. But the process was prone to errors and was not widely adopted by merchants due to the fee that OpenAI was charging merchants. The company retired Instant Checkout in March. Visa's collaboration is different from OpenAI's previous attempts, as it will allow users to link their Visa cards to ChatGPT to shop and make it ..