Paytm, India’s largest digital payments platform has claimed to surpass 5 billion transactions in a year. Gross transaction value flowing through this digital platform is pegged at ₹3,40,000 crores ($50 billion) annually. It has also claimed to have processed over 400 million UPI payments since its launch in January. There has been a 500% growth in the peer-to-peer transactions in the last quarter for Paytm.
Kiran Vasireddy, Chief Operating Officer, Paytm said, “We are witnessing phenomenal adoption in tier-two and three cities, which is bringing in the new wave of growth for us. We have been the largest contributor towards all form of digital payments, including UPI. We will continue to invest further till we digitise payments for majority of the small and large retailers in our country,”.
Tier-two and tier-three cities like Surat, Durgapur, Meerut, Mangalore, Ranchi, Puducherry, Rohtak, Imphal, Rajkot, Panipat, Warangal, Jodhpur, Karnal, Madurai, Jamnagar, Thrissur, Rajahmundry are some of the early adopters leading the way for other cities in driving the growth of Paytm.
Another factor responsible for this unprecedented growth, as reported by Paytm is the usage of its multilingual app. About 25% of the users are using the app in their regional language helping Paytm penetrate the local regions and building customer base. English is the most used language, followed by Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, etc.
There has been a growth in the female users above the age of 35 on the platform, registering a growth of over 100% in the year. Youths still constitute the majority of the user base.
Governments push towards digital payments has been another key factor helping Paytm and other digital payment platforms.
PhonePe, acquired by Flipkart is one of the competitors of Paytm in the country and it has claimed to have processed transactions valued at over ₹1,37,000 crores ($20 billion) in a year. Google Tez, another digital payment platform is yet to disclose its transaction numbers.
“We are also one of the largest platforms in terms of total payment volume as our average transaction value is much higher than other players driven by our continuous focus on customer-centric use cases like Ola, Redbus, Mumbai Metro and others,” said Hemant Gala, head of payments and financial services at PhonePe.