Srinagar: PhonePe, a Walmart-owned fintech, said in a statement that it has enabled online payments for 80 lakh merchants as part of the Reserve Bank of India’s Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) scheme over the last 18 months.
The RBI established the PIDF scheme to subsidise the cost of Points of Sale (PoS) infrastructure (physical and digital modes) in the country’s tier-III to tier-VI towns and North Eastern states.
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.
With the PIDF scheme, PhonePe was able to double down and create digital payment infrastructure across the country, and digitize even far-flung terrains which had so far not been digitized.
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.
PhonePe is accepted as a payment option across the toughest terrains of NER including far-flung towns such as the Changlang district in Arunachal Pradesh.
Assam witnessed the fastest adoption with 2.5+ lakh merchants in 2022 compared to just 10,000 merchants in 2020, followed by Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Mizoram.
Along with the acquisition rate, the transactions – both online and offline in the NER region have also seen a significant rise from less than 1 Lac transactions in Q1 2018 to 2+ crore transactions in Q1 this year.