PhonePe Founder and CEO, Sameer Nigam on Thursday said that after payments and purchases, Indian customers are slowly adapting to managing investments and their money online.
Nigam while speaking at the Converge@Walmart event laid down the fintech’s plans for the next few years. “For financial services, we got to go early-stage on how we approach it. Secondly, have a team looking at innovation and documentation for merchants. We have 21 million merchants who need financial services. They can become agents for distributing other products.”
Speaking about the digitization in India, Nigam said,” Earlier, people had to travel more to pay bills, they were sending money to villages and small towns, all of that is now happening on a phone. Four years ago, everything changed in India, we call it the Jio effect. Smartphones with cheap data have meant that all basic services have shifted to the phone. What we are proudest of is that we played a large role in democratizing payments-based transactions.”
PhonePe Chief Technology Officer Rahul Chari while speaking at the event said, “Our non-metro customers may be coming on the platform for the first time through content. But the next step ends up being payments before they move on to high-value purchases or e-commerce. So, our responsibility is to catch this wave early.”
PhonePe on Wednesday received RBI’s approval to operate as Account Aggregator, a system that will enable users to avail financial services in a more faster and cheaper manner. Through this system financial data of the customers will be shared between Financial Information Users (FIUs) and Financial Information Providers (FIPs) with consent from the customers.