Walmart-backed digital payments platform PhonePe has announced plans to hire more than 20,000 additional on-roll frontline sales personnel over the next year and deploy over 50 lakh payment devices in the same period, with approximately 50% of the devices earmarked for rural India.
The company disclosed the plan on 24 September 2026, describing it as an effort to accelerate the expansion of its merchant network into Tier 6 towns and rural geographies. The device rollout will include SmartSpeakers and POS terminals and will support merchant onboarding, KYC completion and ongoing merchant support in smaller markets.
“The recently announced MDR framework allows the company to take a long view and invest in merchant expansion,” PhonePe said in a statement. The move follows the National Payments Corporation of India’s decision to levy a 0.4% fee on select UPI merchant transactions, with a portion of the proceeds earmarked to expand digital payment acceptance among small merchants in underserved regions.
PhonePe said a dedicated fund using 5% of the MDR amount collected has been earmarked for small merchant expansion, particularly across deep rural geographies including Tier 6 towns and villages. The company also credited India’s new Labour Codes for enabling faster on-roll hiring, noting that streamlined compliance is helping it onboard a large workforce more quickly.
As of August 2026, PhonePe’s payments network comprised more than 720 million registered users and over 50 million merchants. The larger frontline workforce will focus on finding new merchants, completing KYC processes, installing payment devices and helping shopkeepers use digital payment services in Tier 6 towns.
