Sameer Nigam on Fintech Regulation

Sameer Nigam co-founded PhonePe inside Flipkart in 2015 and built it into India's dominant UPI payments platform by transaction share, a position sustained after the 2022 spin-out from Flipkart and the move of the entity's domicile from Singapore to India.

The decision to anchor the product on UPI rather than on a wallet or a payments-bank structure placed PhonePe on the regulated public rails rather than alongside them, a strategic choice that insulated it from the licence-risk that later attached to the payments-bank model.

The expansion into insurance broking, mutual-fund distribution and the Pincode merchant super-app has been the attempt to monetise the payments surface without depending on MDR, whose regulatory status on UPI remains unresolved.

The deliberate refusal to charge on UPI person-to-person payments, and the consequent dependence on adjacent monetisation, frames PhonePe as a firm whose core product is structurally free and whose business model is therefore entirely a function of the cross-sell.