NE BUSINESS BUREAU
AHMEDABAD, FEB 6
Digital payments platform PhonePe on Thursday announced the national launch of PhonePe ATM, a first-of-its-kind service in the digital payments industry in India. The pilot of the new service launched in Delhi/NCR a fortnight ago will enable neighbourhood stores to act as ATMs for the company’s customers. The service has been enabled across 5 lakh offline shops across all the 300 cities where PhonePe is accepted nationally.
Commenting on the launch, Vivek Lohcheb, Head of Offline Business Development, PhonePe said, “In line with our vision of democratising digital payments for the masses and after seeing the encouraging response in Delhi/NCR, we have launched the PhonePe ATM service nationally. The PhonePe ATM allows customers to withdraw through our trusted merchant partners. It also helps merchants avoid the hassle of storing cash and making multiple trips to the bank branch to deposit their extra cash. Additionally, this will also drive more footfalls for our merchant partners. PhonePe ATMs are a great way to start getting consumers and merchants to start adopting UPI payments in large numbers.”
With the national launch, PhonePe is promoting a service that solves a real consumer problem. Customers are often inconvenienced due to the unavailability of banking ATMs in their vicinity or ATMs being out of order or short of cash. Now, a customer in need of cash can simply open the PhonePe app, go to the ‘Stores’ tab and click on the ‘PhonePe ATM’ icon to locate nearby shops offering this facility. Once they reach the nearest shop, customers just need to click on the ‘Withdraw’ button and transfer the required amount to the merchant via the PhonePe app. Once the amount is transferred, the merchant will give the customer the cash equal to the amount transferred. There will not be any charges for customers or merchants to avail of this service. The withdrawal limit for customers will be Rs 1,000 per day per person.
