In February 2023, the company announced that it saw a record distribution of 20 lakh SmartSpeakers within six months of the launch.
“We have enabled digital payments across India and cover 99% of the pincodes today. We went to every village and nook and corner, and today over 35 million merchants have the PhonePe QR. During Covid, a lot of transactions went digital as merchants and consumers did not want to pay cash,” Vivek Lohcheb, Head of Offline Business, PhonePe recalled in an internal showcase event by Walmart on Tuesday.
Rush hours made it even more difficult to tally payments and this led to introducing such a device. “We are now driving 700 million transactions via 2.5 million SmartSpeaker devices across the country,” he stated.
The SmartSpeakers offer payment notifications in 11 Indian languages and give audio alerts for low battery levels. Such convenience, the company claims, is enabling an increase in digital payments.
Lohcheb drew attention to other steps taken to enhance such an ecosystem among small and medium merchants. Last month, the company announced the launch of a new shopping app called “Pincode,” built on top of the ONDC platform. Currently the app is live for customers in Bangalore and is expected to launch in other cities soon.
The app promotes local shopkeepers and sellers and aims to digitally connect each city’s consumers with all their neighborhood stores with the convenience of online ordering, discounts and instant refunds rolled in. “Earlier such a platform did not exist, now consumers can easily do business via the pincode application. We already have 5000 orders a day within a month of the launch,” he added.The app is expected to showcase the strength of neighborhood stores, offering consumers a better and wider selection of products and will include both national brands as well as locally manufactured groceries, apparel, footwear, accessories etc. “This will not only provide a stimulus to the local retailers, but also to the entire local ecosystem powering commerce including the MSMEs and farmers,” a PhonePe release during the launch in April had outlined.
Delving further on some of the steps taken to make lending practices easier for small merchants, Lohcheb stated that they have created a lending marketplace to ease the process. “Small merchants did not have a digital footprint and so many of them were not eligible for formal lending. With transactions happening via our QR, they can create a digital footprint and our lending marketplace can help connect them to formal lenders at lower interest rates with a completely digital process in place,” he elucidated.
Founded in December 2015, the fintech player has over 440 million registered users and has digitised nearly 35 million offline merchants so far.
(Disclaimer: The reporter was in Bangalore on an invitation from Walmart)
