Sameer Nigam, Founder & CEO, PhonePe spoke on ‘Fast Track Financial Inclusion In Post Pandemic’ on the inaugural day of the Screenage Mobile Marketing Virtual Conference

The inaugural day of the 3rd edition of e4m Screenage Mobile Marketing Virtual Conference took place on 19^th November, 2020. The theme of the conference was ‘Mobillion: Connecting the Next 500 Million’. The virtual event began with the welcome address of Dr. Annurag Batra, Chairman & Editor-in Chief, exchange4media & BusinessWorld followed by a keynote session by Sameer Nigam, Founder & CEO, PhonePe. He spoke on the topic: ‘Fast Track Financial Inclusion In Post Pandemic’. Nigam shared insights on the product, marketing and communication initiatives that can get first-time users to the digital payments fold as the Indian digital economy strengthens its hold.

“Building product for a billion Indians”, quoted Nigam while commencing his presentation. The PhonePe Founder and CEO took the audience to a brief journey of the brand since its inception in 2015 till today. To begin his presentation, he had bifurcated it into two distinctive parts. The first part talked about how did PhonePe get the first 250 million Indians to adopt digital payments and the other part was based on how to get the next 500 million Indians to adapt to digital payments by 2022.

Focussing on the first part, Nigam gave a sneak peak on the brand’s initial steps to build a massive open payments ecosystem in the country back in 2015. The idea was to build a single application for all daily use cases and integrate with every bank and payments network by interoperable UPI QR codes. To achieve the same, PhonePe’s primary preference was to facilitate users with an easy interface for money transfer and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) payments. Later on, it expanded to financial services including banking, insurance, mutual funds and others.

Nigam added, “To build a highly scalable, elastic and intelligent platform, one needs to create a positive societal disruption for technology and IP rich organizations.”

He then acknowledged brand’s growth trajectory and said that Phonepe has grown through partnerships, focus on innovations, staying light on physical assets and making automation a cultural habit. Talking numbers, he added, “Out of the 250 million registered users, PhonePe has 100 million monthly active users, 2.5 billion app fires in a month, 13 million merchants across 500 cities, 1 billion monthly transactions and $275+ billion annualized TPV run rate.”

Moving the conversation towards the second part of the presentation, Nigam talked about how to get the next 500 million Indians to adapt to digital payments by 2022. To achieve the same, one has to use simple designs, even simpler interfaces with more intuitive designs, according to Nigam. The interface should aid in easier onboarding and account registration, predictable user flows that follows guesswork, be localized in audio/video instructions, provide hand holding at critical junctures and also be based on machine learning hyper-personalizations.

He then put the spotlight on the need of creating category awareness via mass media campaigns and increasing PhonePe’s trust by addressing to key category concerns. Nigam gave a shoutout to the “Karte Ja Bhadte Ja” campaign starring Aamir Khan and Alia Bhatt and “10 Avatars of Fraud and How to Slay them” social media initiatives to create awareness around safe transactions.

Ending the presentation, he expressed his concern on educating consumers on digital transactions via intelligent customer relationship management (CRM) which includes timely push notifications, hyperlocal personalisations and enabling network effects.

Nigam concluded his session by saying, “ To build a big brand, keep it simple and comprehendible for people to understand and relate easily.”