PhonePe chief executive Sameer Nigam says the company aims to bring one billion Indians on to UPI while expanding into credit, insurance, investments and overseas markets.
PhonePe chief executive Sameer Nigam is betting that India’s digital payments story is still only half-written. Speaking at the BFSI Insights Summit 2026 in an interview with Business Standard, Nigam said the company wants to help bring Unified Payments Interface to one billion Indians over the next decade, building on a base that he said still leaves roughly 600 million people to be brought into the system. He framed that ambition as part of a broader push that also includes cheaper formal credit, international expansion and financial products that can be bought in smaller, more affordable amounts.
That view comes after a decade in which PhonePe has grown from a scrappy startup testing small-value transfers in bank sandboxes to one of India’s biggest digital payments platforms. Nigam recalled the early days of UPI certification, when the company’s 15-person team was still sending tiny transactions late into the night to satisfy technical requirements. Today, he said, the platform can process tens of thousands of transactions a second at peak volumes. Moneycontrol reported earlier this year that PhonePe had crossed 60 crore registered users and was processing more than 33 crore transactions a day, underlining how far the business has come.
Nigam also pointed to the turning points that helped shape the market, including demonetisation and the 2020 Yes Bank moratorium, which temporarily disrupted the payments ecosystem. He said those events ultimately accelerated digital adoption, helping PhonePe add millions of merchants in rural areas and smaller towns. The company’s wider product strategy now includes payments for feature-phone users, a segment Nigam said still matters because a large share of Indians have not switched to smartphones, whether because of cost or preference. Moneycontrol has also reported that PhonePe has secured in-principle approval from the United Arab Emirates central bank for two licences, marking the start of its overseas push.
A major theme of the discussion was regulation. Nigam argued that the debate over a cap on UPI market share should be viewed in the context of a still-growing market rather than a fixed one, saying the industry has room for many players and that competition is already intense. He said the proposed merchant discount rate, or MDR, a fee charged on some merchant transactions, would help make the ecosystem economically sustainable after years in which app-based payments have largely been free to users. That argument mirrors comments Nigam has made elsewhere this year, including at the Global Fintech Fest 2026, where he set out PhonePe’s next phase of growth and the need for viable business models in digital payments.
He was more guarded about regulatory risk in sensitive sectors, saying the abrupt collapse of real-money gaming businesses showed why policymakers sometimes intervene forcefully. Even so, he said the broader direction of India’s rules on payments and data has been constructive. He praised the way the Digital Personal Data Protection Act was developed and said users now have more visibility over their consent settings inside the app. Looking ahead, he said PhonePe wants to do more than move money: it wants to expand access to credit, insurance, pensions and investments, while making digital finance available to people who do not have the latest smartphones or even, in some cases, formal bank-linked habits yet.
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