PhonePe, India’s leading fintech platform announced it has digitized 80 lakh offline merchants as a part of the RBI PIDF (Payments Infrastructure Development Fund) scheme in the last eighteen months.
The Payments Infrastructure Development Fund was set up by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to subsidize deployment of Points of Sale (PoS) infrastructure (physical and digital modes) in Tier-3 to Tier-6 centres and North Eastern States of the country.
It said the PhonePe Pulse data shows that PhonePe’s consistent efforts to educate, engage and empower merchants has led to phenomenal acceptance of digital payments in the North East Region (NER), which is one of the focus areas of PIDF also.
Speaking on the development Vivek Lohcheb, Head of Offline Business said,’’ We would like to thank the RBI for the creation of the PIDF scheme, effectively designing it for companies like us to invest in the digitisation of merchants across the country. In the past it was unviable for companies like us to spend money in rural areas as the market is very scattered, and there was a need to make significant investments in terms of manpower to digitize merchants in remote areas. The PIDF scheme has boosted that infrastructure and is helping us create universal acceptance in every nook and corner of the country. ‘’
Phone said it plans to innovate in strengthening the payment experience of merchants with products like the Smart Speaker which will further improve the reliability of digital payments. The company also plans to use the same infrastructure to bring these merchants on the ONDC platform, while also enabling financial inclusion for even the smallest merchants, helping their business grow further, it added.
