Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: Digital Payments Company PhonePe on Thursday announced that it has set up 10 lakh SmartSpeakers for merchants across the country helping them in processing over 100 crore transactions in three months.
The SmartSpeaker was launched in August this year to enable merchants track payments through a voice alert. The voice notifications can be set in English or any of the other 10 Indian languages that are compatible with the SmartSpeaker.
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The PhonePe SmartSpeaker comes with data connectivity and it can be linked to all the QRs in the merchant’s store. It also has a dedicated battery level LED indicator along with audio alerts for low battery level and a replay button for the last transaction.
“Digital payments are now ubiquitous in India as they have helped eliminate various issues pertaining to cash transactions,” said Vivek Lohcheb, Offline Business Head, PhonePe.
Digital transactions made to businesses have increased at a rate of 175 per cent during covid due to the consumers’ preference for digital payments, said the company’s statement.
Founded in December 2015, PhonePe claims to have 41.5 crore users as of now and it has digitized 3.3 crore offline merchants across Tier 2,3,4 cities.
According to the latest monthly UPI data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the peer-to-merchant (P2M) UPI transaction volume in October has increased by 126 per cent to reach a new all-time high of Rs 386 crores from Rs 171 crores in the same month in 2021. Further, the transactions also jumped 88.4 per cent in value from Rs 1,50,044.24 crore to Rs 2,82,710.45 crore between the same time period.
