Ever since the launch of Paytm’s digital wallet, it has been coming up with amazing initiatives to ease people’s lives. Paytm is a widely accepted payment method across the online and offline channels today.
Continuing the trend of bagging big deals, Paytm has now partnered with NHAI (National Highways Authority of India) for automatic collection of tolls. Starting soon, Paytm will operate toll booth in various parts of the country which will enable the vehicles owners to pay toll using their paytm wallet.
Speaking on the development, Raghav Chandra, Chairman – NHAI confirmed the news saying Paytm has been awarded 40 out of 350 toll booth in the starting phase. The toll booths are still operated using manpower which at times, causes big traffic queues at the toll booths. Paytm will help ease out the situation and customer experience by providing digital way of paying toll.
NHAI started the digital toll booth in April with the help of Fastag cards. It was aimed to enable more digital transactions at the toll booth to target a digital country. The service was first started at 300 toll locations and it was very well accepted by the vehicle owners. To encourage use of FASTag cards, NHAI provided a flat 10% discount on the toll collection amount and the initiative received a great response with banks like SBI, Axis Bank and ICICI encouraging their customers to use FASTag card. The banks were given a flat 1.5% revenue collected at toll booth using their FASTag card.
Paytm is now eying the railway department. The company has already sent a proposal to the railway ministry for a bunch of services. The services include issuing unreserved tickets using the paytm app and use of paytm wallet at railway catering and stalls. The ministry has confirmed to receive the proposal from paytm, however, no decision has yet been taken on the proposal.
Paytm, started as a mobile recharge portal, has ventured into various domains like digital wallet and eCommerce. Off late, the company has been trying to secure some public-private partnerships to grow rapidly by enabling the country go the digital way. Paytm has seen some rapid growth in the last few months with its aggressive approach of getting the smaller merchants on its platform by enabling them to accept payments with very less documentation and without the need of any added device.