“Whether we leave anyone behind”: Sameer Nigam’s blueprint for PhonePe’s second decade

“True progress isn’t measured by how fast the top 10% move; it is measured by whether we leave anyone behind.” When Sameer Nigam uttered these words early during his keynote at the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) 2026, held in Mumbai on 9 September, they served as a philosophical framing for the next decade of India’s digital finance story. It was telling that when Nigam took the stage at GFF 2026, he did not begin with transaction volumes, market share or product launches. Instead, the PhonePe founder and CEO opened with a question that has increasingly come to define the debate around India’s digital public infrastructure: who remains excluded even after a decade of rapid digitisation? And what does inclusion look like on the ground?

Speaking during a session titled ‘PhonePe @ 10 – Unlocking Financial Inclusion for All’, Nigam framed the company’s first decade as part of a larger national transformation. “Over the past decade, PhonePe has operated as a technology pioneer charting India’s progress. Every product across our ecosystem has been thoughtfully crafted to honour our core purpose: removing friction from progress and ensuring that financial security and growth belong to everyone,” he said.

The argument he returned to throughout the address was that financial inclusion is not about creating separate products for different socio-economic groups. “Real financial inclusion was never about building a product based on socio-economic strata. It’s about building one system, flexible enough to meet every Indian exactly where they are,” Nigam added.


Nigam’s remarks offered a framework for understanding both PhonePe’s journey over the last ten years and the direction it intends to pursue in the decade ahead. The company that grew alongside the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) now appears to be asking a different question from the one that shaped its early years. If the first phase was about bringing millions of Indians into the digital payments ecosystem, the next phase is about determining whether that access can translate into meaningful economic participation.

That shift was evident in the first example Nigam chose to highlight. He spoke of a vegetable vendor who earns roughly ₹800 a day and has done so consistently for five years. The vendor has a digital payments trail documenting every transaction. Yet despite years of recorded commercial activity, he remains largely invisible to conventional credit assessment systems. “A vegetable vendor who has made ₹800 in disciplined daily sales for five straight years, with a payments trail to prove it, remains nearly invisible to traditional credit scoring,” Nigam observed.

If digital infrastructure has succeeded in capturing economic activity that once went unrecorded, the next challenge is determining how that data can be translated into something meaningful that further enables access to credit, savings and financial security. Nigam outlined how PhonePe is already using artificial intelligence (AI)-driven underwriting to accelerate the transition from application to disbursal in roughly 2.5 minutes, while exploring ways to treat settlement histories as indicators of creditworthiness.

In many ways, that vegetable vendor became the central character of the keynote. Nearly every announcement that followed, whether related to feature-phone payments, micro-investments, merchant services or credit products, returned to the same underlying premise: start with the people who remain outside the system’s full benefits and redesign the system around their lived realities.

Breaking barriers and removing structural inequalities

For a vast country like India, with its significant geographic, linguistic, cultural and economic diversity, the digital payments revolution cannot be measured through aggregate numbers alone. Often, metrics such as transactions processed, users onboarded, merchants enrolled or payment volumes generated tell only half the story and reveal little about whether participation in the digital economy has translated into broader economic mobility.

Nigam’s address suggested that PhonePe increasingly sees the next stage of growth through that lens. He framed the company’s work alongside the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) as an effort to dismantle three longstanding barriers to participation in the digital economy: what he described as the smartphone wall, the bank-account and household wall, and the border wall.

The first of these remains one of the most prominent fault lines in India’s digital transformation. Despite the rapid spread of smartphones, more than 20 crore Indians continue to use feature phones, particularly in rural and semi-urban regions where smartphone ownership and reliable mobile internet access cannot be taken for granted. For years, that digital divide effectively placed UPI beyond the reach of a significant section of the population.

PhonePe’s response is UPI 123Pay, a non-internet payment stack that uses SMS, IVR, missed calls and voice-based interactions to bring UPI functionality to keypad devices. At GFF 2026, Nigam said more than 8 lakh enabled devices had already been shipped through partnerships with leading original equipment manufacturers.

The service comes preloaded on select handsets, allowing users to activate UPI by selecting their bank, entering debit card details and creating a UPI PIN without requiring mobile data. Early handset partners include Nokia, HMD, Lava International and Itel, with more expected to join the programme.

Next, Nigam argued that participation in the formal financial system often remains uneven even within households and is not determined solely by access to formal banking systems. In many families, one individual controls the primary account while others depend on informal arrangements for everyday transactions.

It is against this backdrop that PhonePe has introduced UPI Circle, which allows primary account holders to delegate spending authority to dependents while retaining oversight of transactions. Women, elderly parents and younger users may participate actively in household spending without necessarily operating the primary bank account. By formalising delegated spending, UPI Circle attempts to shift digital payments from being an individual tool to a shared household utility.

The third barrier Nigam identified extends beyond India’s borders.

As UPI’s international footprint expands, PhonePe is seeking to make the system usable for both Indian travellers and overseas Indians. Nigam pointed to the company’s efforts to enable payments in countries including Singapore, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), France and Nepal, alongside support for more than 35 million NRIs through NRE and NRO accounts. The initiative aligns with the broader internationalisation of UPI being pursued by NPCI International Payments across Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

Making finance fit daily cash flows

Nigam argued that many financial products remain inaccessible not because people do not understand them, but because they are structured around income patterns that large sections of India do not share. For workers with irregular earnings, daily cash flows often matter more than monthly balances. The challenge, therefore, is not simply to make financial products available but to make them usable.

To explain the idea, Nigam invoked what he called PhonePe’s “sachetisation philosophy”, drawing a parallel with the low-cost sachets that transformed access to consumer goods across India, from shampoos to sauces and milk powder. Just as small, affordable units made products available to households that might otherwise have been unable to purchase them, financial products, he argued, need to be broken into smaller commitments that fit everyday spending realities.

Applied to finance, that philosophy translates into allowing users to save, invest or build assets in increments that would once have seemed insignificant. Nigam highlighted products such as PhonePe Daily FD, which allows users to start a bank-grade fixed deposit with as little as ₹100 a day through UPI AutoPay. He also pointed to daily gold, silver and platinum savings beginning at ₹10, enabling users to accumulate 24K gold, silver and 99.95% pure platinum gradually rather than through large one-time purchases.

The same logic underpins daily mutual fund systematic investment plans (SIPs). For first-time investors, Nigam suggested, the greatest barrier is often not awareness but the perceived size of the commitment. By reducing entry thresholds to ₹10 or ₹100, the company aims to make participation easier and more habitual.

To support investment decisions, Nigam spoke about CRISP, a tool intended to provide users with real-time market insights. At the other end of the spectrum, the platform continues to offer lump-sum investments and futures and options (F&O) trading for high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), reflecting the broader “one system” philosophy he repeatedly referenced throughout the keynote.

Can transaction histories become credit histories?

If savings and investment products address one dimension of financial inclusion, credit remains another area where access often breaks down.

Traditional lending models continue to rely heavily on formal income documentation and established credit histories, leaving many self-employed workers, informal-sector earners and small merchants outside the reach of conventional finance. The question is: if millions of Indians now leave behind detailed digital transaction records, can those records themselves become indicators of creditworthiness?

Nigam outlined how the company is using artificial intelligence (AI)-driven underwriting to move from application to disbursal in approximately 2.5 minutes while exploring ways to use settlement histories as proxy indicators of creditworthiness. For merchants who conduct business through consistent UPI transactions but lack conventional documentation, those records could potentially serve as an alternative basis for lending decisions. The company is also offering merchant loans structured around automated daily repayments rather than fixed monthly instalments, a model intended to align repayments with actual cash-flow patterns.

On the consumer side, Nigam highlighted the Wish Credit Card, developed in partnership with Utkarsh Small Finance Bank. The product allows first-time borrowers to begin building credit histories through a fixed-deposit-backed structure, targeting users such as homemakers, self-employed professionals and younger consumers who may not qualify for traditional credit cards.

Alongside these entry-level products, PhonePe continues to offer RuPay credit cards on UPI through partnerships with SBI Card and HDFC Bank.

The merchant question

For PhonePe, consumers are only half the story. The other half is the 5 crore-plus merchant acceptance network that powers everyday commerce.

Nigam presented an integrated suite of intelligent tools aimed at helping small and medium businesses (SMEs) grow, anchored by a rebuilt PhonePe Business App that serves as a gateway to hyperlocal online advertising, personalised market insights and no-code payment setups.

Among the offerings highlighted were SmartConnect and SmartStore, which provide customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities, loyalty programmes and inventory planning tools. Nigam positioned these as mechanisms through which smaller businesses can access capabilities traditionally associated with larger organised retailers.

The company has also continued to invest in physical-store infrastructure. Smart Speakers provide instant voice payment alerts even in noisy environments, while AI Audio Alerts leverage AI-driven voice synthesis to deliver personalised payment notifications in iconic celebrity voices, an attempt to make the experience both reliable and memorable.

On the payments gateway side, SmartPages is a no-code solution that creates AI-prompted payment pages in under 10 minutes. Merchants can describe what they sell in simple language and get a conversion-optimised, mobile-ready payment page without developer help. An AI Integration Agent reduces merchant setup times from weeks to minutes, following official API specifications and best practices automatically. For many SMEs, the bottleneck is not demand but technical bandwidth. By turning integration and page creation into conversational tasks, PhonePe seeks to remove the last-mile friction that keeps smaller businesses offline.

Reading India’s economy in real time

If the first decade of PhonePe helped build the transaction rails for India, the next decade is about understanding what flows through them. Nigam concluded with PhonePe PulsePro, a hyperlocal intelligence platform powered by more than 11 billion monthly transactions. PulsePro delivers insights mapped down to a 40-square-metre cell, enabling businesses and policymakers to see demand patterns, retail expansion opportunities and distribution gaps at a neighbourhood level.

According to the company, PulsePro is an enterprise intelligence engine built on anonymised transaction data from over 71.5 crore users and 5 crore merchants across 99% of India’s postal codes. While the original PhonePe Pulse remains a free resource for policymakers and researchers, PulsePro is positioned as an enterprise-grade analytics platform for companies seeking deeper financial intelligence.

In practical terms, this means a retailer can evaluate site selection not just by city or pincode, but by footfall and spend intensity in specific micro-zones. For policymakers, it offers a near-real-time read on commerce flows that traditional surveys may not capture with the same granularity or frequency.

Reaching the last mile in the next decade

As of August 2026, PhonePe reports over 72 crore life-till-date registered users and a digital payments acceptance network spread across more than 5 crore merchants. The scale is now undeniable; the question for the next decade is how deeply that scale can be converted into everyday financial security for households and growth for businesses.

PhonePe’s roadmap can be read as one attempt to answer that test at scale. When a vegetable vendor’s daily UPI settlements become a credit score, when a domestic worker can start a fixed deposit with ₹100 a day, when a small kirana store can access CRM, loyalty and inventory tools that were once the preserve of large chains, the definition of productive participation in India’s economy widens.

That redefinition could pave the way for a more rooted growth story. More households with formal savings and credit are likely to be more resilient to financial shocks and more able to invest in education, health and small businesses. More merchants with digital tools can be expected to smooth cash flows, plan inventory and expand with better information. And more granular data on consumption and commerce can help policymakers target interventions with greater precision.

And in doing so, the definition of bankable in India can change fundamentally. At GFF 2026, Nigam did not merely present a list of products; he presented a theory of change: build one flexible system, remove friction at every layer, and measure success by how many people move from invisible to included. The next decade will show whether that theory holds at population scale.