Over the past 10 years since we launched on August 28th, 2016, our story has been told mostly in terms of numbers, ever-growing numbers, very large numbers: 700 million users, 50 million merchants, a staggering 1,130 billion payment transactions. And we are proud of the numbers, we are very proud. But the numbers don't define us. These numbers are merely the byproduct of a much larger and consistent vision. And our stated vision is to unlock and liberate the progress of a billion Indians by providing everyone equal access to financial services, digital payments, and digital products. So let me first get started by talking about unlocking UPI for all.
UPI, as everybody knows, is a homegrown network designed for all Indians who have an Indian SIM on their mobile phone. And they need to own a smartphone. And that revolution has been well documented. But what about the other half billion people? What about the people who still don't have a bank account, are Jan Dhan and Jeevan Jyoti account holders, or kids who are still too young to own a bank account? What about the 100 million diaspora, the NRIs and the NRO accounts where people are living abroad but don't have an Indian mobile number? And what about the 200 to 250 million Indians that actually don't even have a smartphone yet? These are the products that we talk about much less. But these are equally important if we really want to solve for a billion Indians.
I am proud to report that over the last 10 years, we have solved uniquely for each of these cohorts of people. We launched what's called UPI Circle for family payments for family members who have a smartphone but don't have a bank account and don't want to transact using their bank account for whatever reason. UPI Circle allows my driver to go to a petrol pump, scan a QR, and allow me to make the payment. UPI Circle allows my teenage kids to roam freely around Bengaluru city, knowing that when needed, if they need to scan a QR code and make a payment, dad and mom can make the payment. UPI Circle allows my 75-year-old mother to make sure that I can make payments for her remotely if she is not sure if they are safe online.
India is coming of age, and we have to solve two different problem statements. We had to solve for Indians who are traveling abroad in large and larger numbers. 40 million Indians travel abroad every year, and as the honorable Prime Minister mentioned yesterday, it is our job to try and make sure we can use our UPI and transact abroad with the same convenience that we can transact within India. We also have a lot of NRIs who have bank accounts in India and want to pay for different goods and services for their family members in India. And I am proud to report that PhonePe has been at the frontier of all the launches in this regard. PhonePe was the first UPI app to launch international payments for Indian consumers on the UPI rails as far back as February 2023.
Over the past three years, happy to report we are now live in UAE, Singapore, Mauritius, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, France, Qatar, and Cambodia. And hopefully, over the next decade, this list increases exponentially. But that's for those of us who are traveling abroad with smartphones. What about the 250 million Indians who are still on feature phones? How do we solve for their inclusion? How do we solve for their ability to make digital payments? I am very happy to report that last month, in tandem with our 10th-year anniversary, we became the first UPI app to have launched feature phone-based payments using the SMS protocol. It's the first of its kind secure payment solution in the world. I am proud to announce that for the launch, we have already gone live with Nokia, HMD, Lava, and Itel phones. We will start distributing the PhonePe UPI 123 Pay app in September and November respectively. With this, we hope to be omnipresent on all new feature phones sold in India for UPI payments.
As I mentioned, this took a couple of years of R&D along with NPCI and the OEMs to make sure we have encrypted with safe payment solutions over the SMS gateways. And we have managed to enable peer-to-peer transfers to any mobile number and any number on your contact book to a UPI ID. We have enabled mobile recharges. We have enabled people's ability to share their QR and start receiving money from anybody else, whether on a smartphone or a feature phone. 40% of Indian feature phones today have a camera. We have enabled scan QR-based payments for all of those feature phones. You can check your bank balance, you can check your transaction history, and very soon we will be rolling out bill payments for the circle based on your SIM number. Plus, the first-ever voice-enabled AI-powered helpline in English and 12 languages to help the consumers understand how to get onboarded and how to use the app safely.
Of all our launches life till date, this is one I am personally proud of because this truly enshrines our principle of leaving no one behind. 'Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas' as they say. Without the feature phone audience, UPI would not get to a billion people. We are making that possible. So that's the payment story. Now let's talk about financial services. I will start with our savings and insurance story. Yesterday, the honorable Prime Minister talked about the need to solve for savings for all Indians. Historically, whether you thought of mutual funds, you thought of the stock market, you thought of life and health insurance, it was something that the haves could get access to and the have-nots were left out. That's no longer the case.
Over the last 6 to 8 years, PhonePe has taken a very conscious and deliberate lead in launching financial products for all Indians with a very deep emphasis on affordability. Last but not least, 10 years ago when we were starting out, we used to be told that India is a data-poor economy. It was when we were launching PhonePe, it was hard to find market data about how large the Indian payments ecosystem really was. Few supportive data points available. But over the last 10 years, the hundreds of billions of transactions across the entire population have allowed India to not just grow its data footprint, but today it is one of the richest and data-richest countries in the world.
And we have taken it upon ourselves as PhonePe, as a beneficiary of the DPI called UPI and Aadhaar and beyond, to give back. So six years ago, we launched Pulse, an open-source website where we took all of our 100 billion plus transactions, anonymized and aggregated them with another Indian startup called MapMyIndia, and put them up on pulse.phonepe.com. You can see all of the Indian consumer payments activity, quarter by quarter, category by category, pin code by pin code. This data is available on GitHub. And I am proud that over the last six years, we have personally presented these data cuts to the government, to our regulator, to the IMF, to the World Bank members, to the Gates Foundation, and local academic institutions.
Pulse has got featured in the monetary policy from the honorable Reserve Bank. It has got mentioned in multiple economic surveys. We recently signed an MOU with the Ministry of Electronics and IT. We are doing work behind the scenes with the housing and planning commissions. We are very happy to give this data back because the next wave of startups in India should start with a leg up in terms of knowing what's actually happening in the market. But the private sector as well can benefit significantly from sharper data insights. And for them, we recently launched Pulse Pro, which is a commercial arm of the Pulse initiative, which allows businesses, brands, marketeers to plan their distribution and launches and scale deep into the country based on the data.
The payments data activity of India in closing the past 10 years has been incredible for us as a company, as an ecosystem. The past 10 years have brought half a billion people into the formal financial systems. But the next 10 years promise so much more, from the expansion of digital payments to reach a billion Indians, to financial services for all, business solutions for every small business, and data availability. We are excited about the inflection point that the economy is in. But 10 years ago, everybody was wondering whether an Indian startup which is launching its app for the first time on an Indian network that was launching for the first time could ever succeed in a globally competitive market.
Look, the idea... either you are working in a sector and you have seen a dilemma, or there is something that you find very innovative. We saw it from both sides because Rahul, my co-founder, and I used to work at Flipkart. This was in 2014. The first Big Billion Day had happened. At that time, to make online payments, there were either credit cards or net banking, and in that, remembering the password and then doing the transaction... forget net banking. The infrastructure for credit cards was not scaling in India. And it was more built for desktop solutions. In those days, it was not built for smartphones. So we knew that in India's network quality, device, smartphone-first market, and new-to-banking, as they say, people's Jan Dhan accounts were being created for the first time. In such an environment, a completely different solution was needed. So we were already talking to banks. We were talking to the India Stack team. And those people were already talking about UPI with banks, India Stack, and the central bank, along with the government. So we felt that we had to build apps, we had to build merchant solutions and consumer solutions. So why don't we join them? If they are already working on UPI here, we join with this ambition. So UPI launched on August 25th, and we launched on August 28th, 10 years ago, and we just started moving together.
