PhonePe Launches Credit Line On UPI, Offering Short-Term Credit For Merchant Payments

PhonePe has introduced a new ‘Credit Line on UPI’ feature, allowing consumers to link credit lines from their banks directly to UPI on the platform.

This addition enables users to effortlessly make merchant payments while benefiting from short-term credit, offering a flexible solution for managing monthly expenses across millions of merchants.

Recently, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) expanded the scope of UPI to include pre-approved credit lines, called ‘Credit Line on UPI’, allowing consumers to avail credit lines through banks and use these through their UPI apps.

Along with consumers, the option also allows merchants on the PhonePe Payment Gateway (PG), to offer their customers an additional payment option at the time of checkout. Merchants simply need to integrate with PhonePe PG to add ‘Credit Line on UPI’ as a payment option to enable this offering.

“This is the second offering that will unlock the potential of credit usage on UPI, following the tremendous success of Rupay Credit Cards on UPI. We believe digital payments in India is growing strength to strength and PhonePe is committed to providing the most innovative and best-in-class solutions to our customers,” said Deep Agrawal, head of Payments at PhonePe.

The Credit Line on UPI operates on the same familiar UPI infrastructure. Users can access this feature by navigating to the profile section on the top left of the PhonePe app’s home page, where they can select the bank from which they availed the Credit Line.

The Credit Line linked to their registered phone number will then be automatically associated with UPI. After setting a UPI PIN, the Credit Line will appear as a payment option on the payment page whenever they make a transaction.

This comes at a time when UPI transactions rose 3.95% month-on-month (MoM) to 14.44 Bn in July from 13.89 Bn in the previous month. On a year-on-year (YoY) basis, the transaction count surged 49%.

The UPI transaction volume in July stood at INR 20.64 Lakh Cr, 2.8 % higher than June’s INR 20.07 Lakh Cr.

In addition, PhonePe continued to dominate the market in July, keeping pace with the overall growth of UPI transactions. PhonePe registered 6.98 Bn transactions worth INR 10.28 Lakh Cr in July.PhonePe held a 48.3% market share in the UPI ecosystem, followed by Google Pay at 37% and Paytm at 7.82%.