PhonePe acquires GSPay IP from GupShup for UPI on feature phones

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PhonePe acquires GSPay IP from GupShup for UPI on feature phones PhonePe has announced an IP purchase of conversational engagement platform Gupshup’s proprietary ‘GSPay’ technology stack for enabling UPI-based payments for feature phones. GSPay is a mobile application built on top of NPCI’s UPI payment solution for feature phones (UPI 123PAY). According to PhonePe, it plans to customize and extend the recently acquired GSPay IP and launch its own feature-phone based UPI payment mobile app on new feature phones in India, over the next few quarters. PhonePe aims to provide all basic UPI features such as P2P transfers, offline QR payments, and receiving of money from any other UPI customer to their mobile numbers or self-QRs seamlessly. This move aims to create full payment interoperability between feature phone and smartphone users and bring crores of Indians who still use feature phones into the Indian digital payments ecosystem. “This segment of users has been historically underserved by the digital financial industry and the broader startup ecosystem. We hope we can enable crores of these feature phone customers to participate in India’s burgeoning digital payments market,” said Sameer Nigam, co-founder & CEO of PhonePe. PhonePe’s portfolio of businesses includes the distribution of financial products (insurance, lending, and wealth) as well as new consumer tech businesses (Pincode and Indus AppStore). As per market research, India had approximately 24 crore feature phone users in 2024, and an additional approx 15 crore feature phone shipments are expected over the next five years. Launched in 2016, PhonePe has over 60 crore (600 million) registered users and a digital payments acceptance network spread across over 4 crore merchants. It also processes over 33 crore transactions daily with an Annualized Total Payment Value (TPV) of over Rs 150 lakh crore.