Introducing PhonePe 3.0: Reimagining Financial Empowerment for Every Indian

At PhonePe, our journey began with a simple belief - that digital technology could fundamentally change how Indians interact with money, making payments simple and accessible for everyone. Seeing hundreds of millions of Indians embrace PhonePe has been a powerful validation of that vision.

India is dynamic, and so are the aspirations of its people. The digital landscape has matured, and user needs have evolved significantly since we started. What began as a need for easy digital payments has grown into a desire for comprehensive tools to manage one's entire financial life – from daily spending and bill payments to long-term investments and insurance.

We always envisioned and saw our customers’ financial journey anchored around send (solving holistically for money exchange of all sorts), spend (avenues for consumers to spend via a vast open ecosystem acceptance network, both online and offline), manage (now supported by offerings like tax-saving funds, gold and mutual funds), and grow (through a multitude of investing options). As payments became ingrained in our users’ daily lives, their continually evolving aspirations and needs required that we make it easier for our users to access these services in an even more seamless manner across this spectrum. This also aligned with our vision of unlocking value through comprehensive financial solutions.

Driven by this understanding, we embarked on a significant effort to reimagine the PhonePe experience. Today, I am excited to share the result of that effort - PhonePe 3.0. This isn't just an app update; it represents our renewed commitment to supporting every Indian's financial journey, making it easier, more intuitive, and more empowering.

Our Compass: Principles Guiding the Evolution

Building a platform that touches the financial lives of so many demands a deep sense of responsibility. As we designed PhonePe 3.0, we were guided by some core principles that reflect our values and our commitment to our users:

01. Relentless Simplification: The world of finance can be complex at times. Our core mission is to simplify these complex products and services, making them understandable and usable for everyone. We have streamlined the homepage to reduce clutter and feature our super categories such as Recharge & Bills, Money Transfer and more, while maintaining the most frequently used interactions unchanged.

02. Intuitive and Welcoming Design: PhonePe 3.0 incorporates a more welcoming and inclusive experience through cleaner layouts and clear visual cues, ensuring effortless navigation for all users. Complementing this, our redesigned icons are instantly recognizable and part of a unified design system, fostering consistency and predictability.

03. Clarity Through Visual Language: To make abstract financial concepts more tangible, our new illustration style aims to help users connect with different features and understand their purpose more easily, complementing the app's functionality.

04. Effortless Management of Tasks: We strive to make managing routine tasks effortless. Key interactions, including reminders, alerts, and recurring payment setups, are prioritized via the alert center and the enhanced search functionality to ensure users can seamlessly stay informed and are in control of their financial needs.

05. Responsible Custodianship: We recognize the immense trust users place in us. Every feature, every design choice is made with the user's security, privacy, and financial needs as the highest priority. This responsibility anchors our work.

These principles weren't just guidelines; they were the blueprint for PhonePe 3.0, ensuring the new experience aligns with our mission to serve India responsibly and effectively.

Embracing Change: The Reason Behind Our Evolution

While our previous app served millions well, the digital ecosystem and user expectations have shifted significantly since our launch. Users now seek integrated experiences that go beyond basic transactions. They need a platform that helps them manage recurring bills efficiently, explore financial growth options like insurance or investments, and handle various daily tasks seamlessly. PhonePe 3.0 was built to meet these expanding needs, providing them a comprehensive financial hub.

Meet PhonePe 3.0: Familiar Trust with Enhanced Experience

PhonePe 3.0 introduces significant enhancements focused on simplicity, speed, and convenience, all while maintaining security and reliability.

01. Find Faster with Global Search: One of the key improvements is the new universal Global Search bar. Prominently placed, it allows you to quickly find contacts, billers, features, and past transactions by simply typing in the search bar. This eliminates the need to navigate through menus, making it faster to get things done. For example, you could find airport cabs while searching for something related to travel or contribute to the National Pension System (NPS) via PhonePe.

02. Enhanced Organizational Tools: The homepage is now structured as a Bento Box. This approach provides a clearer snapshot of essential information at a glance. It makes the homepage easily scannable and makes finding different products or services more intuitive. This organizational improvement extends beyond the homepage with transaction history now featuring improved filtering, clearer navigation, and easier statement downloads to help users stay informed and organized.

03. Evolving Payment Needs & Improved Discoverability: While the core functionality of sending money has remained unchanged, the payments landscape itself is constantly evolving with several new offerings such as RuPay credit cards, UPI Circle, Credit on UPI, PhonePe Wallet and more. As these options grow, making them easy to find and manage becomes crucial. Therefore, PhonePe 3.0 makes it simple to discover new payment options and related settings right on the Homepage.

04. Unified Bill Management: The consolidated 'Recharges & Bills' section makes managing recurring payments like mobile recharge, electricity, rent and credit cards easier by offering one central place to track, manage, and pay dues.

05. Integrated Financial Services: Easily explore and manage financial products like Insurance, Loans, Gold investments, and Mutual Funds within the app, making these services more accessible.

06. Prominent Travel and Transit Integration: Based on user feedback, we have elevated Travel (bookings for flights, trains, buses) and Transit (FASTag, metro recharges) into top-level categories. This simplifies managing travel and transit needs.

07. Refreshed Visuals in both Light & Dark Mode: Along with the redesigned icons and illustrations, we have carefully chosen color palettes to ensure comfort and readability, whether you are using the app during the day or night.

The Engineering Foundation: Build Excellence at Scale

Delivering PhonePe 3.0 required a significant engineering and design effort. Over 200 designers and engineers collaborated to redesign more than 800 screens. Close to 100K new lines of code were introduced to achieve the desired outcome of PhonePe 3.0 and to help refine the core user journeys. Central to this was building our new 'Lego' design system, comprising over 50 master components and 150+ variations. This system ensures consistency, supports features like dark mode efficiently, and enables faster development cycles. We will publish a blog on ‘Lego’ soon!

Our new homepage is built ground up using an internal framework called WidgetX, which is highly scalable and optimized for performance and personalization. This massive effort, delivered in record time, underscores our commitment to engineering excellence at scale.

And Our Journey Continues…

PhonePe 3.0 is a platform built for the future, designed to empower every Indian on their financial journey. It reflects our core values and our mission to unlock the flow of money and access to services for a billion Indians.

We invite you to explore the new PhonePe app. We believe these improvements make it a more powerful, intuitive, and supportive financial companion and we are excited for you to experience it.

Start exploring!

[The author is Rahul Chari, Co-founder & CTO, PhonePe, and the views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.]