Bengaluru-based fintech PhonePe is bringing its insurance operations closer to its core consumer payments business, with Chief Business Officer Sonika Chandra set to lead the combined unit.
Vishal Gupta, who headed PhonePe’s insurance arm and was part of the company’s founding team, has stepped down from his role. Gupta left the fintech on Monday after spending more than a decade with the company and is now preparing to start a new venture.
His exit comes at a time when PhonePe is reshaping parts of its business structure. The company’s insurance business is being merged with its consumer payments business, placing both verticals under Sonika Chandra, PhonePe’s Chief Business Officer.
Gupta had joined PhonePe after his stint at Flipkart, where he worked as Director of Product Management for payments and transactions. In a social media post announcing his move, he said he was returning to the kind of work he enjoyed most: building from scratch, solving difficult problems, finding product-market fit and earning the right to scale.
The departure adds to a recent run of senior exits at PhonePe-linked businesses. In June, Akash Dongre, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of PhonePe-owned Indus Appstore, stepped down. In May, Ujjwal Jain, Chief Executive Officer of PhonePe’s stockbroking platform Share.Market, also quit.
The leadership changes come alongside a pause in PhonePe’s market listing plans. In June, the company said it had temporarily deferred its public listing because of the conflict in West Asia and heightened market volatility. PhonePe said it would resume the listing process once global markets stabilised.
The latest restructuring suggests PhonePe is tightening the link between financial services and its large payments base, rather than running insurance as a more separate vertical. For users, the shift could mean insurance products become more closely embedded within the payments journey. For the company, it brings a key financial services category under a senior business leader already responsible for consumer-facing operations.
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