PhonePe has become the fastest-growing insure-tech distributor in India, and mutual funds (MFs) have seen investment from more than 5,000 cities.
PhonePe has become the fastest-growing insure-tech distributor in India, and mutual funds (MFs) have seen investment from more than 5,000 cities.
Ahmedabad: India’s digital payments firm PhonePe has started gearing up for an initial public offering (IPO) by 2023 and is eyeing a valuation of $7-10 billion. The company’s foray into financial services is going to play a key role in the firm becoming profitable and going public. In the past four months alone, it has added six products in insurance and wealth management. The company said it became the fastest-growing insure-tech distributor in India, and mutual funds (MFs) have seen investment from more than 5,000 cities. “When we launched the PhonePe app in 2016, we created India’s first payments platform. We then went on to launch PhonePe Switch in 2018,” said Sameer Nigam, founder and chief executive officer, PhonePe.
In the past few months, PhonePe has been building partnerships with industry leaders in insurance, MFs, and gold to launch tailor-made offers for its rapidly increasing customer base. “Since January, we have been launching a wide range of financial services products in all these categories, and will continue to innovate, scale up, and positively disrupt these sectors,” added Nigam.
In April, PhonePe launched a coronavirus hospitalisation insurance policy. For this, it partnered Bajaj Allianz General Insurance. With domestic travel resuming, the firm rolled out domestic travel insurance in June. It offers cover for unlimited trips for a year, unlike traditional products that need to be purchased. In July, the firm launched “hospital daily cash”, an affordable sachet-based group insurance product. The same month, it unveiled vector-borne disease insurance. This year, the company also launched Super Funds, which will help investors in identifying top equity, and gold and debt funds of MF companies.
PhonePe said its business came back to pre-Covid levels in June, and had achieved an annual total payment volume run rate of over $200 billion, while clocking 620 million transactions in July.
Here’s what some of the customers have to say about PhonePe’s insurance and mutual fund products:
“I always thought Mutual Funds are risky. But when I got to know about Liquid Funds, I found it to be a good way to invest as there was zero stock market risk. I tried it out and started earning better returns on my money than my savings account. I am very happy saving my money with Liquid Funds.” – D.Kumar Napit, Dhanbad
“I had heard of Mutual Fund Sahi hai but I was confused with which mutual fund to invest in as there are so many funds. Then I saw the Super Funds video on PhonePe which explained how the funds are smartly picked by experts, I decided to try it out. It’s a great product as everything is expert-managed and I don’t have to worry about how much to invest in equity/debt, which fund to select and how to manage my investment going forward.” – Rahul, Jaipur
“I purchased the Coronavirus Insurance policy from PhonePe in May ’20. Unfortunately, I was diagnosed with Coronavirus in mid June ’20, once I recovered and my quarantine period was over, I decided to register a claim. Initially, I thought it would be a tedious process but I was in for a surprise. I registered the claim in the first week of July, the insurer contacted me for my documents, once I sent them the reports and other details, the claim amount was transferred to my account within a week. The entire process was very quick and easy.” – A.Sharma, Visakhapatnam
“I came across the Covid 19 policy on PhonePe and purchased the same in the month of May. In mid June, I had the virus symptoms and on checking I was tested positive. I got my treatment done and once I recovered I tried contacting the Insurer to register the claim. The initial process of contacting them was a little difficult but then I wrote to them about being covid positive. Within no time, they contacted me, asked me for my documents and the claim amount was transferred to my account.”. – N Praveenkumar, Chennai (ICICI Lombard Covid-19 Protection Cover)
