PhonePe moves its businesses, subsidiaries from Singapore to India

Bengaluru-based payments and financial services player PhonePe, on Monday, announced that it has completed the process of moving all its businesses and subsidiaries from Singapore to India. The company, in a statement, stated “…all PhonePe Group businesses and entities are now wholly owned by and consolidated under PhonePe Pvt Ltd - India.”

India’s largest payments app said it has completed the process of moving in three steps:

• The payments company, over the past year, has moved all businesses and subsidiaries of PhonePe Singapore to PhonePe Pvt Ltd. India directly. This also includes its Insurance Broking Services and Wealth Broking businesses.
   
• PhonePe’s board recently approved the creation of a new employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) plan and the migration of the group’s more than 3,000 employees’ existing ESOPs by issuing new ESOPs under PhonePe India’s new plan.
   
• PhonePe, under the newly liberalised automatic ODI rules, has also moved the ownership of recently acquired IndusOS Appstore (OSLabs Pte Ltd) from Singapore to India. The acquisition of IndusOS was completed in July 2022.

In addition to this, the company also plans to go public by 2023. Currently, PhonePe is a leader in the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and owns a lion’s share of 46.36 per cent in the UPI ecosystem.

Rahul Chari, Co-founder and CTO of PhonePe, in an interview with Business Today, said, “The UPI rails support it infrastructurally. The different models will certainly emerge soon.” He added that “QR codes are beautifully placed with the philosophy of simplicity and lower cost for both merchants as well as customers.”

UPI also serves as an acquisition funnel for the startup to cross-sell financial services like insurance and mutual funds. According to data from consulting firm BCG, the big contribution to digital payments’ growth would come from merchant payments in the next five years, jumping from 20 per cent by value to about 65 per cent by 2026. UPI is fast replacing cash in the physical store as well.

PhonePe forayed into financial services in 2017 and has since introduced several mutual funds and insurance with products like - tax-saving funds, liquid funds, international travel insurance and life insurance. PhonePe goes up against the likes of Google Pay and Paytm in the domestic market.

PhonePe was founded in December 2015 and has around 400 million registered users. The company also claims that it has successfully digitised more than 30 million offline merchants spread across Tier 2,3,4 and beyond, covering 99 per cent of pin codes in India.