Sameer Nigam on Network Effects

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.

PhonePe's sustained ~50 percent share of UPI transaction volume, against well-capitalised bank-backed rivals, is the central competitive fact of the Indian payments market and reflects the operational discipline of the Switch layer as much as brand or distribution.