Flipkart-owned payments app PhonePe, which entered the offline commerce space, now has over 25,000 merchants, the company said. Meanwhile, the company said that it controls 80% of merchant transactions on the unified payments interface (UPI), as indicated by this Business Standard report. This takes significance as the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is focussing its efforts on increasing the number of person-to-merchant payments (P2M). For the month of July, the NPCI said that 20% of all UPI transactions were merchant based. In July, the number of UPI transactions stood at 11.63 million and a majority of them coming in from BHIM. Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Electronics and Information Technology told Parliament that close to 50 lakh (5 million) transactions happened on the BHIM App, worth Rs 1500 crores. Meanwhile, PhonePe mentioned that it has partnered with payment aggregators like Pine Labs and Commdel and that "a lot of merchants are being on-boarded through them". It is also going live with 15 pan-India chains in the next quarter. In the online space, it is adding over 50 online merchants across food, travel, shopping as merchants. MDR on merchant transactions A spokesperson for PhonePe said that company is still charging merchants for every UPI transaction. It is worth remembering that banks are allowed to charge merchants a higher fee for UPI transactions as compared to P2P transactions. On the UPI, merchants are charged a merchant discount rate (MDR) of 0.25% for payments below Rs 1,000 and 0.65% for all other charges. However,…
