Phone Pe Ties Up With VIVO IPL 2019 To Scale Its Reach In India

Sameer Nigam, CEO & Founder, Phone Pe, in an interview with BW Businessworld discusses how sports leagues in the country can help extend financial services provided by fintechs to a large part of India. During this discussion, he highlighted the growth VIVO IPL 2019 could bring to the Phone Pe table. The brand, while expanding its user base in India, is also concentrating on bringing in innovations and use cases. 

What are the parameters when you choose to associate with a certain sport? How are Sports leagues benefiting businesses like PhonePe to grow?

Cricket is the most popular sport in India and VIVO IPL is the biggest sporting event of the year. The 2019 season is the 11th edition of the league and it continues to hold mass appeal across the length and breadth of the country. It is one of those few events that is watched by the entire family together, making it the most captive and engaged audience that maps perfectly with the kind of consumers we are looking to connect with. As the official co-presenting sponsor for the TV broadcast of VIVO IPL 2019, we are very well placed to create awareness about the benefits of digital payments as well as the PhonePe app.

While merging with the biggest sporting league in the world (IPL), how much has PhonePe invested and how do you measure the ROI?

The main objective of associating with a sporting league like Vivo IPL is to be able to take brand PhonePe to every single household across the country. We want to introduce digital payments to a billion Indians and with Vivo IPL we have the perfect platform to do that. We will be introducing a series of new TV ads that will create awareness around UPI as well as the ease of using the PhonePe app. Customer acquisition and brand recall among the target audience will be a few of the metrics that we will look at while measuring the effectiveness of the association as well as the upcoming brand campaign.

What are the future marketing plans for PhonePe & how will it continue to help evolve consumer behaviour?

This year we will be very aggressive in our marketing and branding initiatives. We have several exciting things planned that will help us to create understanding around the diverse offerings on the PhonePe app. The idea will be to build a strong consumer connect.

Where do you see PhonePe in the next 5 years? What is the market percentage you wish to capture during this period? 

We don’t bother much about market share. Over the next few years, the focus will be on innovation with a view to bringing more and more use cases into the PhonePe app. The Indian digital payments market is still in a very nascent stage and our endeavor will be to accelerate the pace of digital inclusion for millions of local merchants and customers in India.