Still have 600 mn users left to acquire on UPI: PhonePe chief Sameer Nigam

At the BFSI Insight Summit 2026, PhonePe CEO Sameer Nigam outlined plans to take UPI to a billion Indians, while questioning market share caps and backing MDR to sustain digital payments

PhonePe wants to take the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to a billion Indians over the next 10 years, Founder And Chief Executive Officer Sameer Nigam said during a fireside chat with Business Standard's Editorial Director A K Bhattacharya at the BFSI Insights Summit 2026. As the payments company  completes 10 years, Nigam also addressed concerns about the proposed cap on market share for UPI apps, the return of the merchant discount rate (MDR). Edited excerpts:

 

How do you look back at PhonePe’s first 10 years?

 

In early 2016, we sat with people from India Stack, iSpirit and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) over hackathons and bank sandboxes. Nobody imagined the tsunami of innovation the UPI would unleash. For each partner bank that went live, you were required to complete 5,000 successful pre-production transactions for certification. Our 15-member team stayed up till 2 or 3 am sending ₹1 transactions to meet that limit. Now, we can do about 25,000 to 30,000 transactions a second at the peak.

 

 

What was the high?

 

About 450-500 million Indians actively use digital payments today. Our data shows we got a little over 50 per cent of all life-to-date UPI customers, and a lot of it is disproportionately from Tier II regions. But numbers get boring. What never gets old: After a cold morning safari in Assam’s Kaziranga, I, with my family, stopped at a chai tapri and saw a PhonePe QR.

 

...and the low point?

 

The Yes Bank moratorium in 2020 meant 24 stressful hours; we then had ICICI Bank as a partner. Demonetisation turned into a force multiplier for digital payments. Covid was a shock for a few weeks, until we saw the belt was in the green. So, we acquired about 10 million merchants in rural India and the foothills. 

 

Where do you want to be in 10 years?

 

One, take UPI to a billion people. Three months in, our UPI for feature phones does about 3 lakh transactions a month, and we will maybe reach 1 million by December. Two, affordable formal credit for small businesses and consumers. Credit is preposterously expensive for those who need it and can repay. Three, go global. We’ve launched in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and applied in a couple more markets. Four, sachetise insurance, pensions and investments.

 

Won’t smartphones make feature phones irrelevant?

 

Since my Flipkart days, I’ve heard feature phones will disappear. Yet 25-30 crore people haven’t moved, due to affordability or choice. Many, including Gen Z, don’t want social media but want payments. With chip prices up, sub-₹15,000-20,000 smartphones aren’t getting made. Payments should be like electricity. I didn’t build a business case; we aligned our board and treated it as a product hack. Ten years ago, any venture capitalist would have said “UPI who?” Sometimes you just have to take asymmetric bets.

 

Critics say you’ve become too large. What about the talk of a market share cap?

 

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)’s circular is six years old. It came because WhatsApp, with 600 million users, was entering in 2019-20 and there was a concern it might prematurely come and monopolise a market that was yet to be created. Today, there are over a hundred third-party UPI apps. Apple Pay is just entering. My friend Kunal Shah has joined WhatsApp, so you can bet WhatsApp Pay will return. With agentic commerce, OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini will do payments too. There’s no dearth of competition.

 

As long as UPI itself remains fully interoperable on the input side, anybody in this room can launch a new UPI tomorrow. And pretty much anyone who's in the startup ecosystem, the banking universe or corporate India has launched a UPI. So, clearly my presence is not deterring people from coming in. And my market share is not deterring people from investing. My day-zero belief was that the best app would win the most users; you have to believe that’s playing out. As the merchant discount rate (MDR) debate shows, no app gets to charge, so pricing isn’t a lever. Only 450 million users are on board; 600 million more are still to be acquired. If somebody told you there are 600 million users in one country that you could go after in a market where you have no barrier to entry, I don't think you'd be talking about market share; you'd be talking about what you could go after in building differentiated stuff. Navi is now almost at 4 or 5 per cent. Earlier it was CRED, before that super.money, and before that Tata Neu. The problem has been sustainability. For us, this is the core mission. For many, it was a feature.

 

What if, come December, you can’t onboard new customers because of the market share deadline?

 

I’d protest, but comply. We operate in a regulated business. We pride ourselves on being compliant at all times. Why shouldn’t a new user have free choice? With the regulator and government, I think it’s settled that denying choice won’t happen. I believe that the market will become naturally more competitive if sustainable business models for payments directly become available. You can’t have a vibrant payments market with no money in payments.

 

Real money gaming vanished as a category overnight. Does regulatory risk worry you?

 

We were at most a payment gateway there. It’s disturbing when 300-400 companies shut overnight, though maybe the industry had it coming. No founder likes a circular shutting down a business, but sensitive sectors need some of it. I’d like regulators, not just ours but all the policymakers, to spend less time on price intervention, from taxi rides to food technology.

 

How do fintechs engage with regulators?

 

Ten years ago, financial technology (fintech) was a new word for the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (Irdai). Now there are representative bodies such as the Payments Council of India, with 150 members, and the Fintech Association for Consumer Empowerment (FACE), now a self-regulatory organisation. Bankers once saw us as the pesky kid saying “uncle, please give me APIs (Application Programming Interface)”, or as a disruptive threat. Today, we talk about partnerships. I want to take the National Pension System to everyone through the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA).

 

Does the new data protection law worry you?

 

We had a head of data privacy in 2018, before the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act. Early drafts spooked us, but the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) consulted well, and I like how the law landed. Users can see their consents in profile settings. We probably have one of India’s weakest ad businesses; Big Techs want all my data, so we don’t let Google and Facebook advertise on PhonePe.

 

How do you respond to the argument of MDR benefiting foreign-owned companies?

 

Our draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) is public. We’ve spent close to $1.7-1.8 billion over 10 years, all losses, getting UPI to market. In 2016, UPI launched, 100 per cent foreign direct investment was allowed, and we were asked to build apps and acquire every kirana store. So, do I feel guilty for bringing in $2.5 billion, making no life-to-date profit and taking UPI to half a billion people? No. We invited foreign capital; we can’t object when businesses finally make money.

 

Calling MDR a foreign-company issue is a joke. There are maybe “five foreign companies” among 200. Tata Neu, Navi, CRED, State Bank of India and Jio Pay aren’t foreign. The sector stopped growing because nobody can keep funding a system whose costs rise with agents, cybersecurity, know-your-customer and fraud checks. Any Indian operating within the law should be able to charge a fair price. At 0.4 per cent, as NPCI has announced, it would be the cheapest MDR in the world.