Sameer Nigam on D2C Economics

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.