PhonePe, one of India’s leading payments apps, has announced that it will continue to pay its contractual employees, their complete salaries, while they continue to work from home. The app uses UPI to complete transactions, a technology that was launched in 2016.
The platform will pay all its employees and contractual workers-including the entire offline sales agents, their full salaries throughout the work from home policy, as announced by the company in a press release. The company said that this decision was taken to ensure that employees and their families are not “adversely impacted, from a financial standpoint”, especially in a time that is already very economically challenging.
The platform, which was launched in 2015, had made it mandatory for all its corporate workers to work from home as of 12th March, later extending the proposition to all its contractual employees, including about 8,500 offline sales agents and 1500 customer service agents across the country(which includes all the 3rd party contract workers as well).
However, this means that the company’s customer support staff will be working from home, which will lead to delayed responses. Therefore, the company has urged its users to send their queries through the PhonePe app itself.
As a precautionary measure, the company has also ensured to take up self fumigation of its offices and all their facilities while the WFH directive is in play.
In the wake of the virus, banks like HDFC and ICICI have urged users to resort to digital transactions like UPI more, as staff in banks (offline) has been dwindling due to the proposed self isolation. Banks have also pleaded to use these features to pay bills instead of going out.
However, due to restrictions imposed on travel, closing down of shops and general slowing down of transactions, digital payments are estimated to face a decline of 30% in transaction value over the past few weeks according to industry executives, according to ET. While the customer traffic on digital channels are still high, it is the falling value of transactions that has been credited for this loss.
