PhonePe co-founder Rahul Chari reveals plans to broaden existing customer activity within the app, expand into everyday services, and diversify revenue streams with a focus on inclusion, system security, and emerging commerce models.
PhonePe co-founder Rahul Chari says the payments group’s next phase of growth will come less from acquiring entirely new habits than from broadening what existing customers already do inside the app. In an interview with Business Standard, he said there is still considerable room to deepen usage among more than 700 million registered users, even though the most common activities remain concentrated in a small number of features. He argued that the company’s longer-term opportunity lies in helping people move beyond sending money and towards spending, saving and investing.
Chari also pointed to a push into more everyday services, including a universal ticketing layer intended to bring transport and other bookings into a single system. He said this remains a fragmented market and could become more widely used if formalised. At the same time, PhonePe is trying to bring more people into the digital payments ecosystem, including feature-phone users. The company has launched UPI on SMS for basic phones, extending beyond transfers and recharges to bill payments and scan-and-pay functions. Related reporting on the company’s strategy says the goal is to reach a much larger pool of users who are still outside regular smartphone-based digital finance.
On systemic risk, Chari said the engineering problem is already largely solved. He said PhonePe operates three data centres in different parts of the country and works with multiple payment service providers, including Yes Bank, Axis Bank and ICICI Bank, so consumers are not tied to one platform or one handle. That view rests on UPI’s interoperability, which he said means apps are substitutable and users are not locked into a single provider.
The business mix is also shifting. Chari said PhonePe now thinks about revenue in three buckets: payments, distribution built on top of payments and lending distributed through its platform. Payments and distribution will remain major contributors, but he said lending should become a meaningful share over time. He added that the company is currently acting as a loan service provider, using transaction and behaviour data to help banks and non-banking lenders underwrite customers, while suggesting an NBFC licence is less urgent unless the current model begins to stall. Business Standard has also reported that PhonePe returned its account aggregator licence earlier this year, choosing instead to work with other licensed players.
Chari said the company does not see the loss of any single category as a strategic problem, including areas such as gaming and rent payments that have been curtailed. Instead, he said PhonePe judges success through lifetime value per user and expects that figure to rise as new services are added. He also said the company is preparing for a possible shift towards agentic commerce, in which software agents help complete transactions and paperwork. If that market develops, he said PhonePe would be ready to serve as a backend payments processor for merchants, while also exploring conversational shopping, KYC support and other agent-led functions inside its own app.
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