Speaking to Moneycontrol, Ankit Gaur, director, online business, PhonePe, said: "It is early days of IPL and we have already started seeing growth in transactions."
PhonePe is betting big on sports this year. It joined hands with fantasy sports platform Dream 11 in February and has seen a three times month-on-month growth in transactions.
The company is expecting a 10x growth in transactions this IPL season.
Speaking to Moneycontrol, Ankit Gaur, director, online business, PhonePe, said: "It is early days of IPL and we have already started seeing growth in transactions."
He added that the company is very enthusiastic and interested in the fantasy gaming space.
"We are very bullish about this space and what we can offer to the users of fantasy gaming," he said.
The payment platform is the first to offer direct UPI (Unified Payments Interface) payments solution on Dream 11 which has 50 million users on its platform.
"The gaming space in India is going through a revolution. There is a lot of buzz that is happening around fantasy gaming. Globally, it is a multi-billion dollar industry but in India it is still nascent. Within that Dream 11 has taken a very early leadership position and they are by far the largest in the industry," said Gaur.
According to a report, Dream 11 is now being valued at $1 billion and has become the latest member to join the unicorn club. The company also aims to double its user base from 50 million to 100 million by the end of the year.
Along with Dream 11, PhonePe is also partnering with other e-sports firms.
"We have also gone live with Mobile Premier League (MPL). We are live with smaller players like MyTeam. We will continue growing in this space," he said.
Mobile Premier League (MPL), a mobile gaming startup, which is around 10 months old, has around one million daily active users. The company aims to bring this number up to five million after it got on board cricketer Virat Kohli as its brand ambassador early this year.
While growth in tier I market for Dream 11 remained same but tier II cities continues to grow and even PhonePe saw a lot of transactions coming in from tier II and III markets like Patna, Jaipur, Vizag. "In addition to tier I cities, 60 percent of the users are coming in from tier II and III cities as well," said Gaur.
For PhonePe the main objective to associate itself with sporting league is to take the brand to a vast population and introduce digital payments. And IPL will prove to be the right platform for the payment company to build a strong consumer connect.
The company which is is owned by e-commerce giant Flipkart claims to have completed more than 225 million UPI transactions in February. It faces competition from companies like Google Pay and Paytm.
In 2017, Flipkart had committed an investment of $500 million and in March this year PhonePe raised around Rs 743 crore ($107.6 million) from its parent entity. This is reportedly one of the last tranches of the committed investment in PhonePe.
