PhonePe plans 20,000 sales hires for a rural merchant push

PhonePe announced plans on September 24 to add more than 20,000 frontline sales employees to its payroll over the following year. It also plans to deploy more than five million SmartSpeakers and point-of-sale devices over 12 months, with roughly half targeted at rural India.

The work extends beyond distributing hardware. PhonePe says the larger field team will onboard merchants, complete know-your-customer checks, install devices and provide ongoing support in smaller towns and villages. That makes physical distribution and service capacity central to a business often seen mainly as an app. These are announced hiring and deployment targets, rather than completed jobs or installations. The company links the expansion to investment in payment acceptance for smaller merchants across less densely served locations.