Getting More PhonePe Users to Set Up Bill AutoPay
Two changes to get more PhonePe users onto bill AutoPay: better timing, and visibility before the debit
✳The problem they went after
People paying utility bills on PhonePe keep doing it manually even though AutoPay already exists. Two things hold them back. The feature is hard to find in the first place, and they do not trust money leaving their account automatically without knowing the amount in advance. One is a discovery problem, the other is a trust problem, and they need different fixes.
✳What they actually did
RICE scoring surfaced two priorities. Discoverability work places the AutoPay prompt at the highest-intent moment, directly after someone completes a manual bill payment. Bill Preview Notifications take on the trust half by alerting AutoPay users 48 hours before each deduction with the bill amount, flagging unusual spikes, and offering one tap to skip that cycle rather than cancel the mandate outright. Activation rate is the primary metric, with nudge click-through, post-payment conversion, 30 and 60-day retention and notification opens behind it.
✳What you can take from it
Worth stealing
- Prompt placed right after a manual payment
- 48-hour preview with unusual-spike flagging
- Skip one cycle instead of cancelling the mandate
- Guardrails on early cancellations and manual drop-off
Read this if
Fintech and subscription PMs fighting distrust of automatic debits
The transferable bitLook closely at what the skip button does. Cancelling a mandate is a permanent loss, while skipping one cycle keeps the user in the product on a month they would otherwise have opted out of entirely. Designing an escape hatch smaller than churn transfers to almost any subscription or auto-debit flow.
✳The submission itself
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