PhonePe unveils decade-long fintech roadmap at GFF 2026

PhonePe founder Sameer Nigam outlined the company's decade-long fintech roadmap at GFF 2026, highlighting financial inclusion, UPI innovations, AI-driven lending, investment products, merchant solutions and hyperlocal intelligence aimed at expanding digital finance and supporting businesses across India

Mumbai: PhonePe on Wednesday highlighted its vision for the next decade at the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) 2026.

In a keynote address, Sameer Nigam, founder and CEO of PhonePe, detailed the company’s strategic roadmap to drive digital progress for individuals, households and businesses across the country, marking a decade of pioneering technology and massive scale.

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To kick-start the session, Sameer spoke about PhonePe’s core philosophy and its focus on inclusive growth.

He said, “True progress isn’t measured by how fast the top 10 per cent move; it is measured by whether we leave anyone behind. 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 added, “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.”

He further highlighted that PhonePe has worked alongside NPCI to systematically break down the “walls” — smartphone, bank account and border barriers — that have historically kept people out of the digital economy.

Talking about addressing the hardware barriers that have historically locked more than 20 crore feature phone users out of the digital economy, Sameer highlighted the rollout of UPI 123Pay.

He noted that this non-internet, SMS, IVR, missed-call and voice-based technology stack brings the complete power of UPI directly to feature phones, with more than 8 lakh enabled devices already shipped in partnership with leading OEMs.

The official also spoke about how products such as UPI Circle are allowing primary account holders to safely delegate spending to dependents, making digital payments a household habit.

Finally, addressing the border barrier, Nigam shared how PhonePe has expanded UPI for travellers in countries such as Singapore, the UAE, France and Nepal, while enabling seamless payments for more than 35 million NRIs through NRE/NRO accounts.

Touching upon the democratisation of wealth and savings, he introduced PhonePe’s “Sachetization Philosophy”.

Comparing it to the accessibility of a Rs 2 shampoo sachet, he elaborated on how the platform is turning heavy financial commitments into simple, everyday habits for daily-wage earners and small businesses. This includes flagship innovations such as PhonePe Daily FD, allowing users to start a bank-grade fixed deposit with as little as Rs 100 a day, alongside daily gold, silver and mutual fund SIPs starting at just Rs 10.

Addressing the need for guidance in the investment space, he introduced CRISP, a tool providing users with real-time market clarity, while noting that the platform also scales seamlessly to support high-net-worth (HNW) users with lump-sum investments and F&O trading.

Addressing the critical need to reshape credit access at scale, Nigam shared how PhonePe’s AI-driven underwriting now enables loan disbursals in just 2.5 minutes.

Highlighting the gaps in the previous system, he said, “A vegetable vendor who has made Rs 800 in disciplined daily sales for five straight years, with a payments trail to prove it, remains nearly invisible to traditional credit scoring.”

PhonePe is addressing this by using daily settlement history as a credit score for automated daily-repayment merchant loans.

He emphasised that the company is extending credit to millions of users without a prior score, highlighting the newly introduced Wish Credit Card, which helps first-time borrowers build credit starting with a simple fixed deposit, alongside premium offerings such as RuPay Credit Cards on UPI in partnership with SBI and HDFC.

Expressing excitement about unlocking progress for the merchant ecosystem and the broader economy, he introduced an integrated suite of intelligent tools aimed at driving scalable growth.

An anchor to this is the rebuilt PhonePe Business App, serving as a gateway to hyperlocal online advertising, personalised market insights and no-code payment setups. The ecosystem includes SmartConnect and SmartStore, data-driven CRM, loyalty engines and predictive inventory planning to maximise customer lifetime value and streamline operations.

Physical store innovations include smart speakers and AI audio alerts, leveraging AI-driven voice synthesis to deliver personalised audio payment alerts in iconic celebrity voices.

PhonePe Payment Gateway innovations include Smartpages, a no-code solution that creates AI-prompted payment pages in under 10 minutes, and an AI Integration Agent that reduces merchant setup times from weeks to minutes with zero errors.

Concluding the session, he presented PhonePe Pulse Pro, a hyperlocal intelligence platform fuelled by more than 11 billion monthly transactions. It delivers insights mapped down to a 40-square-metre cell to empower businesses and policymakers to make strategic growth decisions.