Online payments market is heating up in India with increasing competition as new players keep entering. In an move to stand out from the crowd and offer unique options and features, Flipkart-owned PhonePe has today announced a new PhonePe ATM feature.
Under this new feature, the company will now allow its customers to send money to a merchant using its platform and then the customer can take cash of the same amount from that merchant.
PhonePe has revealed that the feature is now live on its platform and also added that more than 75,000 merchants in Delhi-NCR have signed up for the same. While the service is currently limited to that region, the company says that it will expand this if the response for this pilot project is good.
The company says that any merchant can sign up for the ATM on PhonePe feature using the PhonePe Business app. Once they sign up, they have complete control over it and can enable or disable the service at will. Also, the company has clarified that customers can only withdraw ₹1,000 per day using this service.
Given the lack of sufficient number of ATMs in India, this seems lke a good move from the company. If this pilot is successful, expect other companies to introduce a similar feature through their platform as well.
PhonePe claims to have around 540 million monthly transactions on its platform through more than 175 million users. Last month, the company had announced that it crossed 5 billion transactions on its app. The Bengaluru-based company had crossed the one-billion transaction milestone in November 2018.