PhonePe partners with Axis Bank; beats Google Pay in UPI transaction volumes for January

Walmart-backed digital payments platform PhonePe on Monday announced a partnership with the country’s third largest lender, Axis Bank. The move is in line with UPI’s  (unified payment interface) multi-bank model, which lets partnering payments app users create different UPI IDs for different bank accounts. 

This collaboration will also give PhonePe access to the bank’s merchant base. 

Until now, PhonePe’s key banking partner was Yes Bank, catering to PhonePe’s 265 million registered customers. Collaborating with multiple banking partners is expected to strengthen the overall service reliability and uptime of PhonePe's offering.

“We are excited to partner with Axis Bank to provide our users an option to create and transact using @axl handle on PhonePe. Our platform now enables the users to choose between multiple handles for their UPI transactions on the multi bank model. This partnership with Axis Bank will ensure greater business continuity for both our customers and merchant partners making their transaction experience seamless,” Hemant Gala, VP, financial services and payments, PhonePe said in a statement. 

Separately, according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), in January 2021, PhonePe’s monthly UPI transaction volume stood at 968.72 million, clocking in total value of Rs 1,91,973.77 crore, highest among the top three payments apps in the country including Google Pay and Paytm, which together account for more than 80% UPI transactions in the market.

In the same period, Google Pay’s transaction volume stood at 853.53 million for a transaction value of Rs 1,77,791.47 crore. Paytm Payments Bank’s total volume of transactions for the month was 332.69 million for a total value of Rs 37,845.76 crore.

The digital payments platform recently granted employee stock option plans (ESOP) worth $200 million to all its full-time employees. Bengaluru-based PhonePe added that the scheme launched in January affecting 2,200 employees.