Over the past 10 years since we launched on August 28th, 2016, our story's been told mostly in terms of numbers. Ever-growing numbers, very large numbers: 700 million users, 50 million merchants, a staggering 130 billion payment transactions. And we're proud of these numbers. We're very proud. But these 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.
To mark our 10th anniversary today, I would like to actually share some of our lesser-known stories and some of our initiatives and launches that over the last decade we are personally very proud of. These don't always make the headlines. They dwarf in comparison to the UPI payments volumes, but these are as critical in shaping the economy over the next 10 years. 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's been well documented. But what about the other half a billion people? Our Gen Alpha and Gen Zs, our kids who are still too young to own a bank account. What about the 100 million diaspora, the NREs 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'm 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 payments for family members who have a smartphone but don't have a bank account or 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 Bangalore city knowing that when needed, if they need to scan a QR code and make a payment, dad or 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's not sure if they're safe online.
India's coming of age and we have two different problem statements to solve for. We have to solve for Indians who are traveling abroad in 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 phones and transact abroad with the same convenience that we can transact with in 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'm proud to report that PhonePe's been at the frontier of all the launches for this cohort as well. So, let's look at how we solve for the traveling Indians.
PhonePe was the first UPI app to launch international payments for Indian consumers on the UPI rails as far back as Feb 2023. Over the past 3 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 our 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'm 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 a first of its kind secure payment solution in the world.
I'm proud to announce that for the launch, we have already gone live with Nokia, HMD, Lava, and Airtel phones will start distributing the PhonePe UPI 123 app in September and November respectively. With this, we hope to be omnipresent in 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 safe payment solutions over the SMS gateways.
And we have managed to enable peer-to-peer transfer to any mobile number or any number on your contact book to a UPI ID. We've enabled mobile recharges. We've 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've 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, a first-ever voice-enabled AI-powered helpline in English and 12 languages to help these consumers understand how to get onboarded and how to use the app safely.
Of all our launches live till date, this is what I'm personally proudest 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'll 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 7 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.
We have fixed deposits and people can buy deposits of worth lakhs of rupees, but I'm happy to report we recently launched recurring deposits starting at as little as 100 rupees a day. Mutual funds. Our mutual funds daily SIP, it's a novel product. We were the first to roll out a 10 rupee SIP that starts at as little as 10 rupees a day. Why the need for daily? India earns on a daily basis. The belly of the Indian economy runs on daily working capital. So, why should all saving products be monthly or annual? We genuinely believe that mutual funds and deposits needed to be solved for on a daily basis. With mandates, we managed to do it.
Daily mutual funds SIP on PhonePe starting at just rupees 10. Mutual fund investments are subject to market risks. Read all scheme related documents carefully.
I had to put that disclaimer in. It's just ingrained into our psyche. But, we are trying to solve for every target group in India. And I think the point I wanted to land was we are launching products that all of the people in this room have heard about for generations. But, we are launching them for every Indian, including those who've never heard about these products. That love extends to metals as well. India's favorite savings product continues to be gold. And here, too, we were the first player in the market to have introduced daily gold savings starting at 10 rupee mandates.
Just save gold on PhonePe.
I'm proud to share that we have several million customers every month who are saving their money or investing it in mutual funds separately and in gold SIP separately. These are habits that will help people who did not have a regular saving product available to them to start saving incrementally, but this adds up. The gold that we sell is backed by or is 24-karat gold. It's the highest purity. There's gold backing every purchase you make and it is insured in bank-grade lockers. So, we are providing the kind of safety, the kind of experience that people in this room have been used to to people across the heartland of the country.
The same is true with insurance. Like any other insurance broker, we have the whole suite of products. We offer motor insurance and health insurance and life insurance. But, our products start at 25 rupees. Our products have a monthly EMI solution including for your health insurance because it's important that you be able to actually pay for your insurance the same way you pay for a smartphone purchase on a Flipkart or an Amazon. Affordability is key. Not just that, we believe it is very important to launch seasonal insurance products for needs that are very, very customized. Amongst the largest selling products till date have been our firecracker insurance and Kumbh Mela insurance.
For all those Bollywood movies in the '60s and '70s where mera beta bichad gaya, meri maa bichad gayi, you at least have insurance if your stuff gets lost. For all of those pranks we played with firecrackers as kids, if you burn yourself, at least you have insurance when you go to the clinic. And it is our ambition, it will be our endeavor to keep launching more and more of these unique products.
Let's talk about credit. India as a market, as we all know, is starved for credit. Now, how do you solve for credit for 1 billion people? There are those who have no credit score. There are those that have a great credit score. And then there's everybody in between. And we solve for each of these in our own unique way. For those who don't even have a credit score, we launched the first FD-backed credit card.
This FD-backed RuPay credit card allows customers with a deposit of as little as 2,000 rupees to start their credit journey and actively build their credit history. We've often been told that we become too massy at times. So, just to make sure we cover the gamut, we also launched co-branded RuPay cards with the two biggest issuers in the market, both on the public sector and the private sector side, SBI and HDFC. This is the most premium card in the market today.
Besides the credit cards for new-to-market as well as premium customers, over the last 3 years, we have made sure over 100 million Indians have been able to check their credit score, for most of them for the first time, for free on PhonePe. For these customers, we have launched products that give them tips on how to improve their credit score by demonstrating better financial behavior. We have launched secured and unsecured loans in partnership with most of the NBFCs and banks in the country. We offer gold-backed loans. We offer mutual fund-backed loans. We offer unsecured loans to millions of Indians. And again, the keyword is we offer them to most people. This is their first credit product. We are very proud of these innovations because we believe that this allows us to extend our trust relationship, which was built on the back of payments, into broader financial inclusion and participation.
But lest we not forget, India's economy runs on the back of almost 65-70 million MSME businesses. PhonePe over the last decade has created a network of almost 50 million merchants live till date. For these merchants, again, we have solved their payment needs, we've solved for their working capital and lending needs, and we've solved for their growth needs. In payments, everybody knows about the QR codes. I'm sure you've seen them all over the country. But it wasn't that easy. It wasn't just taking a QR code. You have to personalize. You have to emotionally connect with the needs of the merchant. And we did that with personalized sound speakers, smart speakers.
This may seem gimmicky to a lot of people here. But when you get into the streets state by state, these celebrity voices calling out the payment that was received digitally actually makes merchants want to receive payments digitally and customers make payments. You will find a lot of neighborhood stories where people have personalized their QR codes. People have personalized the speakers and most of all, it makes the entire experience casual and fun. Payments doesn't need to be boring, so we just have some fun with some of these solutions.
But even with loans on the back of all the data footprint that you have because of the firehose of digital payments happening in India, we were able to launch a product much needed in India for loans to small merchants. This was called the EDI or equated daily installment repayment product. Historically, most loans you had to repay on a monthly basis, but Indian businesses run on a daily plan. And because we are in the path of the payment settlements, we were able to launch the EDI product which makes repayment for all of our businesses much, much, much easier. We launched this product in 2023. I'm happy to report we have already issued more than 1.5 million loans over the last 3 years to merchants, 90-some percent of whom this is their first formal loan.
And finally, not to leave behind our D2C economy, the influencers, all of our aspiring app developers and website developers, we launched the Indus App Store which is India's first indigenously grown App Store where they get a fair share of their merchandising and their discovery. We've launched novel ad solutions and performance marketing solutions for all of these businesses over the last several years and we will continue to actively focus on helping the next PhonePe start at zero base and hopefully scale as fast as we've been lucky enough to over the last 10 years.
Last but not least, 10 years ago when we were starting out, we used to be told that India is a data poor economy. When we were launching PhonePe, it was hard to find market data about how large the Indian payments ecosystem really was. There's a few sporadic data points available. But over the last 10 years, the hundreds of millions of transactions across the entire population have allowed India to not just grow its data footprint, but today it is one of the data-richest countries in the world.
And we've taken it upon ourselves as PhonePe, as a beneficiary of the DPI called UPI and Aadhaar and beyond, to give back. So, 6 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'm proud that over the last 6 years, we've 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're 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 payments data activity of India.
In closing, the past 10 years have 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. 10 years later, we are talking about going global. And I'm very proud to report today, especially for my media friends because they always come to GFF looking for new sound bites, PhonePe is going global. We just received our first international licenses from the Central Bank of the UAE. So, PhonePe will be launching its operations locally in the UAE as our first foreign market. And it's a very proud moment for us because the last 10 years were only about solving within the Indian borders. Hopefully 10 years later when we meet we can talk about a truly global business having got built out through India, from India, for Indians, but then for the world. Thank you very much.
