PhonePe Promotes Key Executives As Segment CEOs To Scale Up New Businesses

PhonePe on Tuesday (November 07) said the number of registered users on its platform has crossed the 50 Cr mark and one in three Indians is now registered with the fintech giant.

PhonePe, which was founded in 2016, said it has onboarded over 37 Mn merchants covering over 99% of the postal codes across India.

The Walmart-owned company, which began operations as a UPI platform and enjoys the highest share in UPI transactions, has been on an expansion spree for the last year or so. It has entered multiple new segments, ranging from insurance to wealth management and lending to joining ONDC.

In order to scale up the new businesses, PhonePe founder and CEO Sameer Nigam said the company has elevated some of the key executives to take on larger roles in the group as the CEOs of new segments.

The newly elevated executives are:

• Hemant Gala: He has been promoted to the role of CEO for PhonePe’s lending business. He was a part of the founding team of PhonePe and has worked across multiple verticals within the company over the past 7 years. 
• Vishal Gupta: He has been promoted to the role of CEO for PhonePe’s insurance business. He was also a part of the founding team and played multiple leadership roles across product, design, risk, customer-experience to build and scale the payments and merchants business.
• Vivek Lohcheb: He has been promoted to the role of CEO for ecommerce app Pincode. In the new role, he will be responsible for scaling the Pincode offering across key cities in India. Previously, Vivek headed the offline business at PhonePe, where he was responsible for expanding the company’s offline merchant network and acceptance.
• Ujjwal Jain: He has been promoted to the role of CEO of Share.Market to head the company’s wealth and stock broking business. Previously, Ujjwal founded WealthDesk and created a curated research baskets category on broking called WealthBasket to address the challenges faced by the funds and broking industry as a whole.

The developments come at a time when PhonePe is looking to spread its wings and turn itself into a super app. The company, which is also eyeing an initial public offering by 2025, moved its domicile to India from Singapore last year and also completed its spin-off from the Flipkart Group.

The company has also raised $850 Mn in funding as part of its announcement of a $1 Bn fund raise last year.

Last month, PhonePe said its revenue rose 77% to INR 2,914 Cr in FY23 due to growth in money transfers, mobile recharges, bill payments and launch and scale-up of new products and businesses. However, the company didn’t disclose its net loss/profit for the year.