Phonepe UPI Bills App for Constituent Telephones to Origination Quickly Acquires GSPAY TECH from Gupshup

PhonePe has now taken a new big step to spread digital payments to the feature phone users. The company today announced that it has bought intellectual property (IP) of GUPSHUP’s UPI-based ‘GSPAY’ technology (IP). Under this deal, PhonePe will now customize GSPAY and launch its own UPI app for new feature phones in India. The company aims to rollout this platform in some upcoming quarters and can include millions of feature phones users in digital payment ecosystem.

PhonePe has informed through press release that this new app will be based on NPCI’s UPI 123Pay platform, especially designed for users who use feature phones instead of smartphones. Through this app, users will be able to use basic UPI features such as Person-to-Person (P2P) transfer, offline QR payment and payment from mobile number or self-QR.

Talking about this acquisition, PhonePe’s co-founder and CEO Sameer Nigam said, “We are excited to use it to acquire GSPAY Technology Stack and to use it to bring UPI payments to India’s broad feature phone usbase. This class of users has been historically done by digital financial industry and comprehensive startup ICSSTM. Crores of feature phones can enable customers to participate in India’s growing digital payment market. “

The company says that it wants to bring full UPI interoperability, that is, feature phone users can also use UPI like smartphone users and there is no gap between the two. With this, crores of people of the country who are still out of the digital payment system, will be brought towards financial inclusion.

Sharing industry data, the company said that by 2024, about 24 crore people used feature phones in India. And in the next five years, there is a possibility of more than 15 million new feature phone shipments. In such a situation, this segment is becoming a major appearance for digital payments.