PhonePe appoints former Standard Chartered CEO Zarin Daruwala to the board ahead of IPO

Zarin Daruwala appointed to PhonePe board

Fintech major PhonePe has appointed former Standard Chartered India and South Asia CEO Zarin Daruwala to the board ahead of its proposed initial public offer (IPO), according to an update on the company website.

Daruwala, a veteran with over three decades of banking experience, retired from Standard Chartered in April after serving as the CEO for nine years. Before that, she was with ICICI Bank for 26 years.

Walmart-owned PhonePe on February 20 announced that it is starting preparatory steps for a potential IPO to list on Indian exchanges.

Daruwala joins Teamlease founder Manish Sabharwal, former Blackrock executive Rohit Bhagat, former IAS officer Tarun Bajaj, Walmart executives John David Rainey, Donna Morris, and Leigh Hopkins, and PhonePe founders Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari as board members.

PhonePe redomiciled from Singapore to India in December 2022, with the intention to list in India. It is the country’s largest mobile payment company with close to 50 percent market share.

Recently, PhonePe designated chief executive Nigam, chief technology officer Chari, chief financial officer Adarsh Nahata and company secretary Ankit Popat as the key management personnel (KMP) as part of the IPO process.

The digital payments company, at its extraordinary general meeting on April 16, decided to change the name from "PhonePe Private Limited" to "PhonePe Limited", as part of the process of turning itself into a public company.

Steep valuation

The company was valued at around $12 billion in its last private fundraising.

The Bengaluru-based company is the country's largest digital payments player with close to 47 percent market share in Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the real-time mobile payments platform run by National Payments Corporation of India. Google Pay is the second-largest player with around 37 percent of the market.

Publicly-listed Paytm has around 6 percent market share in UPI, and is valued at around $6 billion. However, Paytm has a much higher revenue owing to its strong financial services revenue as well as its strong merchant acquiring business.

In FY24, PhonePe reported a 73 percent year-on-year increase in revenue at Rs 5,064 crore. Its Profit After Tax (PAT) came in at Rs 197 crore against a loss of Rs 738 crore in the previous year.