Q&A with Mojaloop Foundation Director Sameer Nigam, Founder and CEO of PhonePe
Mojaloop Foundation Sponsor members will take on the responsibilities of providing financial, technical and legal assistance to ensure the health and growth of the Mojaloop and its user community. We recently interviewed Sameer Nigam, Founder and CEO of PhonePe. Sameer will serve on the Mojaloop Foundation Board of Directors.
Please introduce yourself and your company.
SN: PhonePe is India’s fastest growing digital payments platform and is committed to creating a large, scalable transaction ecosystem that creates the maximum positive impact for all stakeholders. As the CEO and Founder of PhonePe, I am deeply passionate about using technology to solve complex problems. Over the next decade, digital payments are going to become more accessible to the next billion users and our goal is to facilitate this change by building payment solutions for this user base.
If we want to make the world a more financially inclusive place, we need to work together, as institutions, governments and technology companies, to make payment systems interoperable. We are looking forward to advancing Mojaloop’s mission of financial inclusion. Together, we can help organizations understand how to build interoperable digital payment systems, provide low-cost access and feel confident in creating systems that work across borders.
Why is Mojaloop Foundation’s mission of financial inclusion important to your organization?
SN: PhonePe is a pioneer in the digital payments space in India. We built the country’s first open payments ecosystem using technology and human innovation allowing consumers, merchants, and financial service providers to engage and transact with each other. Today, over 230 million registered users and 11 million merchant outlets across 500 cities in India have access to digital payments via PhonePe. Mojaloop Foundation’s mission of increasing financial inclusion by empowering organizations and creating interoperable payments systems to enable digital financial services for all resonates strongly with what PhonePe is working towards.
What excites you about most about the Mojaloop Foundation? What are you looking forward to most?
SN: The Mojaloop Foundation is committed to giving the world’s poorest easy access to financial tools that they can use to build better and more secure lives for themselves, their families and their communities. We are excited to work with Mojaloop to build cross-platform and cross-border payment systems that drive financial inclusion and enable digital financial services for all.
What other types of companies do you think might benefit from joining the Mojaloop Foundation?
SN: Companies that have the objective to co-create a scalable, sustainable global digital platform for payments and financial services to truly democratize finance and inclusion.
About Sameer Nigam
Sameer Nigam founded PhonePe Private Limited in 2015 and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Before starting PhonePe, Sameer served as Senior Vice President -Engineering and Vice President – Marketing at Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce platform. His Flipkart journey started in 2011 when the company acquired his earlier startup – Mime360. Mime360 was a digital media distribution platform.
