Walmart's PhonePe crosses 300 mn registered users, merchant network grows

The service now has over 20 million offline merchants across 11,000 towns and talukas in India

Walmart-owned digital payments firm PhonePe said it has crossed the 300 million lifetime registered users milestone. The company reported 125 million monthly active users (MAU) and an annualized TPV (total payment volume) run-rate of over $390 billion in May '21. Its merchant network also continues to grow rapidly across India, and now has over 20 million offline merchants across 11,000 towns and talukas in India.

"We are delighted to have crossed the 300 million registered user mark and remain grateful for the trust that so many Indians continue to repose in us,” said Sameer Nigam, founder and CEO at PhonePe.

PhonePe competes with rivals such as Google Pay, Amazon Pay, and Alibaba-backed Paytm. It had crossed the 250-million registered users mark in November 2020, and added another 50 million registered users in less than 6 months. In March 2021, PhonePe became the first industry player to process over one billion UPI transactions in a single month and has been clocking over a billion UPI transactions on its platform every month since then.

Nigam said that the PhonePe app is processing transactions from over 19,000 pin-codes spanning more than 99 per cent of the country. More than 80 per cent of these transactions are being done by users in Tier 2, tier 3, tier 4 cities and beyond. The firm said this is a testament to the fact that digital payments adoption in Indian is truly inclusive.

“We will strive to build even simpler, more localized and more intuitive payment solutions to address the needs of every Indian consumer in order to achieve our mission of getting 500 million Indians to adopt digital payments by 2023."