PhonePe has received its first international licence from the Central Bank of the UAE and will begin operating locally in the country, Founder and Chief Executive Officer Sameer Nigam said on Wednesday.
“PhonePe is going global,” Nigam said on Wednesday. “We just received our first international licence from the Central Bank of the UAE. We will be launching operations in the UAE as our first foreign market.”
The licence will allow the company to acquire merchants, deploy point-of-sale (PoS) devices and offer foreign exchange services, Nigam said, without specifying a launch timeline.
PhonePe’s overseas presence has so far been built around Indian users travelling abroad. The company has enabled UPI payments for Indian travellers in the UAE, Singapore, Mauritius, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, France, Qatar and Cambodia, all of them transactions by Indian users drawing on Indian bank accounts.
In the UAE, that acceptance came through Mashreq’s NEOPAY terminals in March 2024, routed via NPCI International Payments. Operating locally will mean directly serving UAE merchants and customers.
Under the Central Bank of the UAE’s retail payment services framework, a payments licence is distinct from a banking licence, which permits deposit-taking. The framework covers nine categories, including merchant acquiring, payment aggregation, payment account issuance and domestic and cross-border fund transfers. That would mirror PhonePe’s structure in India, where it distributes credit, insurance and deposit products through bank and NBFC partners, rather than holding a banking licence itself.
Separately, Nigam said PhonePe has become the first UPI application to launch payments on feature phones, aimed at an estimated 250 million Indians without smartphones. The service works over the handset’s messaging channel instead of the internet. Users can transfer money to any mobile number or UPI ID, share a QR code to receive payments, recharge connections and check balances.
The company also launched Pulse Pro, a paid version of its Pulse data platform, which has published anonymised payments data by category and pin code free for six years.
PhonePe on Wednesday announced a partnership with Visa to launch three products. Tap to Pay lets users tokenise a Visa card on the app and pay in a contactless manner at PoS terminals from an Android phone. Cross Border Scan to Pay will let users scan Visa QR codes in 14 markets including Singapore, Japan and China. Smart Accept lets small merchants take card payments on their smartphones without a PoS machine.