PhonePe acquires GSPay IP to bring UPI to feature phone users

PhonePe plans to enable seamless UPI features—such as P2P transfers, offline QR payments, and money reception—on feature phones, aiming to bridge the digital divide and ensure full interoperability with smartphones across India’s payment ecosystem

PhonePe has announced an IP purchase of conversational engagement platform Gupshup’s proprietary ‘GSPay’ technology stack for enabling UPI-based payments for feature phones.

GSPay is a mobile application built on top of NPCI’s UPI payment solution for feature phones (UPI 123PAY). PhonePe plans to customize and extend this recently acquired GSPay IP and launch its own feature-phone based UPI payment mobile app on new feature phones in India, over the next few quarters.

Bridging feature phones and UPI

PhonePe aims to provide all basic UPI features such as P2P transfers, offline QR payments, and receiving of money from any other UPI customer to their mobile numbers or self-QRs seamlessly. The ambition is to create full payment interoperability between feature phone and smartphone users and bring crores of Indians who still use feature phones into the Indian digital payments ecosystem.

Sameer Nigam, Co-Founder and CEO at PhonePe, said, “We are excited about acquiring the GSPay technology stack and using it to bring UPI payments to India’s extensive feature phone user base. This segment of users has been historically underserved by the digital financial industry and the broader startup ecosystem. We hope we can enable crores of these feature phone customers to participate in India’s burgeoning digital payments market.”

According to industry data, India had approximately 24 crore feature phone users in 2024, and an additional ~15 crore feature phone shipments are expected over the next five years. This represents a significant opportunity in bringing users who have so far been left out of the digital payments ecosystem into the fold, thereby driving financial inclusion.