Building an app for Bharat is actually a very challenging task: Anuj Bhansali, PhonePe

The mobile payments ecosystem has grown tremendously in the last few years and the pandemic has only accelerated the adoption of these apps. During this time, digital transactions were extremely important for every day needs. UPI has dominated the market with 11 billion transactions in 2019 and more than $373 billion in annualised payments value in 2020, according to an S&P global Mobile Payments market report 2020.

With this rate of adoption, safety and trust becomes extremely important to grow one’s user base and dominate this ecosystem.

Continuing with the Video Knowledge Series by Adgully in partnership with mFilter, the latest episode features Anuj Bhansali, Head, Trust and Safety, PhonePe. In this interaction, Bhansali talks about building an app for Bharat and the challenges, role of safety and trust, initiatives by PhonePe and their vision for 2021.

What are the elements that one needs to keep in mind while building an app for Bharat? Please give us some insights on your learnings from this ecosystem and the challenges faced.

Building an app for Bharat is actually a very challenging task. In India, the demography is so widespread that every age group from all over India will be using the app. At PhonePe, we believe in technology to give every Indian an equal opportunity to unlock the flow of money and access to services. We actually take major pride in the fact that most of our user base comes from small towns in India, which is truly the power of technology to provide this democratised access.

From a broader design perspective, we’ve been very conscious about providing solutions for Bharat and we have realised that simple and inclusive design is a key element for great customer experience. We took a different approach and actually tried to understand our diverse customer base on the app on things like the kind of payments made and devices used. Based on that, we designed the app which is simple and easy to use. Even for adoption of the app, we took a multi-lingual approach and produced a lot of educational content to educate the user on the app as well find easier ways to smoothen out online payments.

In terms of solutions, for example, we have millions of merchants that use our PhonePe for Business app. They are normally busy throughout the day and can’t keep checking the phone to see if the payment has been received. We introduced Voice confirmations to the app, where the merchant gets a Voice prompt whenever they receive payment and also, the Voice notification will be in their preferred language. 

How important are Safety and Trust while building an app for Bharat? In what ways can the app ecosystem bring assurance to the consumer?

We’ve done many initiatives to make the customer feel safe while using our platform, and also to make the platform safe through technology. If you look at Bharat, the adoption of UPI has been phenomenal. Everyone uses it today. As a leading player in this ecosystem, we undertook a massive awareness exercise to educate people on the safety of this medium and digital payments as well as the ease of digital payments. 

In the last 4 years, our objectives are very clear, make a simple app to use, meet customer requirements and make sure they have enough trust and comfort to continue using PhonePe.

One of the good aspects of digital payments in India is that it’s a two-part verification process. In spite of this, there is still social engineering that people will fall prey to. We have taken two approaches to this. One is trust, where we educate the customer. We continually communicate with our users alerting them of any frauds that are happening. Earlier, we would communicate this through blog posts amongst several other channels. We also did customer CRM and various digital campaigns to alert our user and educate them. We also alert our users through app messaging, where they are dealing with any unknown contacts or numbers where security might be of concern. We also work with several media outlets and media houses to make sure the customer receives education on digital payments through every channel that they use – be it social media, blog posts, videos or newspapers.

However, even with all these efforts there were still frauds happening and there we took a technological approach. We heavily invested in technology and tools to detect fraud transactions. Our fraud engine detects frauds through various sources and collects information on the transaction, whether it is time, location, if the device was previously used and the nature of the payment made. It calculates all of that in real time and gives you a risk score. Depending on the risk score, it either shows a warning or blocks the contact directly.

We also monitor all our user accounts for suspicious activity or track anyone who isn’t using the platform in its best interest. We actually go ahead and blacklist such accounts. We have a machine learning model, where it analyses your account details and detects any fraud.    

Catch the complete conversation here: