NE BUSINESS BUREAU
NEW DELHI, SEP 2
Fintech major PhonePe on Thursday launched ”Pulse”, a new website that will provide data, insights and trends on digital payments on its platform.
The company has also launched the Pulse Report, an in-depth study on the evolution of digital payments over the past five years.
PhonePe Pulse website showcases more than 2,000 crore transactions by consumers on an interactive map of India. The insights on the website and in the report have been drawn from two key sources, the entirety of PhonePe’s transaction data combined with merchant and customer interviews.
With over 45 percent market share, PhonePe’s data is representative of the country’s digital payment habits, the company said.
According to the website, 394.13 crore PhonePe transactions (across UPI, cards and wallets) were clocked in the June quarter, with total payment value at Rs 7.47 lakh crore. The average transaction value during the second quarter was Rs 1,897.
Of the total transactions, 174.42 crore transactions were peer-to-peer payments, 149.96 crore were merchant payments, 68.5 crore were related to recharges and bill payments and 33.97 lakh were related to financial services in the June 2021 quarter.
In the January-March quarter, 345.75 crore PhonePe transactions (across UPI, cards and wallets) were logged with a total payment value of Rs 6.28 lakh crore. The average transaction value during the second quarter was Rs 1,818.
UPI has emerged as one of the most popular digital payments mechanisms in the country with fintech platforms like Paytm, GPay and PhonePe jostling for a larger share of the pie.
The free-to-use platform will be relevant to multiple ecosystem stakeholders including the government, policy makers, regulatory bodies, media, industry analysts, merchant partners, startups, academic institutions and students, PhonePe CEO Sameer Nigam said during a virtual briefing.
He added that the rich data set along with insightful trends and stories can be used by these partners to understand consumer and merchant behaviour, and identify new opportunities for growth.
Nigam emphasised that the data on the platform will be anonymised to protect users” privacy, and the information will be updated on a quarterly basis.
The website offers a slew of granular data, including number of transactions in a particular district made between users and to merchants or towards bill payments and financial services.
“Pulse is our way of giving back to the digital payments ecosystem. When we started PhonePe five years ago, we struggled to get reliable granular data on digital payments trends across the country,” Nigam said.
He added that the company wants to help unlock opportunities for others to build in India.
“We had promised ourselves that if we are successful and gather enough data on our platform, we would open it for anyone who wants to get deeper insights on the Indian payments industry,” he added.
PhonePe Pulse is an extension of the company’s open platform approach to the information it has garnered at scale with the view of democratising the access to this data for the benefit of other stakeholders in the ecosystem, PhonePe co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Rahul Chari said.
“The end product today is only the start and we hope others take the same approach to data sharing and transparency,” he added.
Chari said it will shortly put out a bunch of developer APIs that they can use to use data to power some of their decisions on products.
Application Programme Interface or API is a set of functions and procedures for building software.
“We put privacy as at the top most as the top was concerned while building and designing paths. We”ve made sure that no consumer details are available. And yet, all of the trends are available to anyone who wants to see them,” Nigam added.
