PhonePe designates top officials as key management personnel after turning into public company

The update is a key process as part of the company’s move to becoming a public company from a private company, ahead of its planned Initial Public Offer (IPO).

Payments giant PhonePe has designated chief executive Sameer Nigam, chief technology officer Rahul Chari, chief financial officer Adarsh Nahata and company secretary Ankit Popat as the key management personnel (KMP), the company said in a regulatory filing on May 20.

KMP executives are considered the point persons for any regulatory issues or for communication with the Reserve Bank of India or markets regulator Sebi, among others.

The update is a key process as part of the company’s move to becoming a public company from a private company, ahead of its planned Initial Public Offer (IPO).

PhonePe’s request was approved by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs on May 1, documents filed with MCA show. Moneycontrol accessed the MCA documents through the private company database firm Tofler.

“Confirming that this is part of our statutory filing,” PhonePe said in an email statement.

While PhonePe had previously listed some top leaders and board members as among the executives who are part of KMP in its annual report, this is the first clear classification of who the KMP are as per legal standard.

Road to IPO

The Walmart-owned PhonePe is the country’s largest mobile payment company with close to 50 percent market share.

At the company’s extraordinary general meeting held on April 16, it was decided to change the name from PhonePe Private Limited to PhonePe Limited.

PhonePe said on February 20 that it was starting preparatory steps for a potential IPO. On February 25, Moneycontrol reported that PhonePe had picked Kotak Mahindra Capital, JP Morgan, Citi and Morgan Stanley as advisers for the IPO, seeking a valuation of up to $15 billion.

PhonePe redomiciled from Singapore to India in December 2022. The company said it has established a clear corporate structure with each of its new non-payment businesses as fully owned subsidiaries.

"PhonePe's strong top-line and bottom-line growth across its diverse business portfolio, as detailed in its FY23-24 annual report, makes this a suitable time to prepare for a public listing", the company said at the time of the announcement.

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.