From worrying about losing your wallet to making sure you never lose your smartphone, India’s relationship with money has changed dramatically in the last decade.
As PhonePe marks 10 years, Founder & CEO Sameer Nigam looks back at the company’s journey, the conviction that drove its mobile-first approach, and what he sees as the next big opportunity. From affordable credit and financial services to taking Indian technology to the world, the next decade is going to be exciting and full of opportunities for India.
Watch the full conversation from Global Fintech Fest 2026.
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What Sameer Nigam said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Sameer Nigam, CEO and Co-Founder of PhonePe, discussed the company's ten-year journey at the Global FinTech Fest 2026. He said the shift from worrying about a wallet to never losing a smartphone shows India has leapfrogged the West, where cards are still needed. He said he could not have imagined processing over 10 billion transactions a month and that market share never excited him, only absolute volumes. Nigam identified credit availability as the single largest opportunity, saying formal credit at affordable rates for all Indians is essential for the Viksit Bharat goal. He mentioned that during COVID, PhonePe sent one lakh people to digitize rural kirana shops. He advised his 2015 self to be more patient, as regulated businesses move slower than consumer tech. For the next decade, he predicted a billion people will adopt payments and hoped PhonePe could expand abroad.
Key takeaways
India has leapfrogged the West because people now prioritize smartphones over wallets, even where cards are needed.
PhonePe processes over 10 billion transactions a month, a scale Nigam never imagined possible in 2015.
Affordable credit for all Indians over the next 10 years is the surest path to the Viksat Bharat goal.
During COVID, PhonePe sent one lakh people to digitize every rural kirana shop.
Over the next 8 to 10 years, a billion people will adopt payments, mostly via UPI.
Well, we're here at the Global FinTech Fest 2026 and there's quite a milestone that's being celebrated. Of course, there's 10 years of PhonePe and the man who's behind it all, of course, founder and CEO of PhonePe, Sameer Nigam. Sameer, thank you so much for joining us today. And what an incredible milestone that is. You know, before I get into more of the questions, what's amazing is, of course, PhonePe's journey also reflects India's journey with money in a lot of ways. What is something that has actually struck you as changing the most, and how has PhonePe really enabled it, would you say?
And I think that's a huge shift. We've leapfrogged the West in so many different ways because even there you need cards. So, yeah, it's been a journey.
It absolutely has been a journey. And what a journey indeed: 10 billion transactions, commanding almost 46% volume of UPI. I mean, those are some mind-boggling figures. Did the younger Sameer from 2015 ever think of something like this, do you think?
You know, honestly, there's no way we could have imagined that we'd be processing over 10 billion transactions a month. China was already further along with Ali and Tencent, so you'd heard of these crazy benchmarks, but they sounded astronomical. So, no, the scale was not something we thought about. Market share is something we never thought about until the market started reporting it about five, six years in. That's never really sort of excited me. The absolute volumes are very, very exciting.
Yeah, absolutely. There is a lot to be excited about because the fact is, of course, you started with payments as an original proposition, so to speak, and then now we see you morphing into this whole ecosystem really of financial services. Tell us a little bit about what excites you the most on that front, particularly. I mean, obviously you're moving into wealth and financial services in a deeper way, credit lending, a lot of other exciting things which are being of course announced here at GFF as well. So tell us what excites you the most at this point.
By far and away, the opportunity to use both the distribution rails we've set up and the data that we've managed to actually gather to make credit available for all. Because from a compounding impact at a population scale, if we can leverage what's happened in the last 10 years to enable credit availability, formal credit at affordable rates for all Indians over the next 10 years, that is the surest way for India to ever reach what we call the Viksit Bharat goal. Because without affordable credit, I don't think we get there. We're just too large a market to get there. But today, more than ever, I think we have an opportunity. So that, for me, is the single largest opportunity. The second is just the fact that we managed as a country to build very cheap distribution of anything digital, which means that sachetized savings, insurance, you name it, financial products is now within reach. So affordability and reach.
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Nigam, S. (2026, September 11). Decade One of PhonePe: Sameer Nigam on India’s Digital Payments Journey & What Comes Next [Interview transcript]. ET Digital. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1337801/
MLA
Sameer Nigam. "Decade One of PhonePe: Sameer Nigam on India’s Digital Payments Journey & What Comes Next." ET Digital, 11 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1337801/.
BibTeX
@misc{nigam2026_1337801,
author = {Sameer Nigam},
title = {Decade One of PhonePe: Sameer Nigam on India’s Digital Payments Journey \& What Comes Next},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, ET Digital. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1337801/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
