Paytm — one of the leading fin-tech startup in India which enables users to make digital payments, has now integrated BHIM UPI — government’s mobile payment interface.
Till now, Paytm was not supporting UPI-based payments on its platform even though UPI-based payments have increased enormously since quite sometime. Many popular digital payments startups, including PhonePe and Google’s recently launched Google Tea, works on UPI-based payments.
With the integration of UPI-based payments on its payments platform, Paytm is now focusing on increasing its users base. Currently, the company is said to have around 100 million monthly users on its platform.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of One97 Communications, has said that they are now targeting 200 million monthly users in less than two years. He hopes that UPI will also allow larger ticket size transactions.
Renu Satti, managing director and chief executive officer, Paytm Payments Bank, said,
As a part of our journey of being a truly open payment platform, consumers and merchants should both have complete range of choices to select payment source and destination. With the availability of BHIM UPI to our large user base and merchant network, we believe the next wave of digital payments will begin soon.
Paytm users will now be able to send and receive money over BHIM UPI from within the Paytm app. This integration also allows existing BHIM users to link their accounts with the BHIM API on Paytm. Also, new BHIM accounts can also be created from within the Paytm app.
BHIM or Bharat Interface for Money is an application developed by the National Payments Corp. of India (NPCI) for digital payments over the government-managed Universal Payments Interface (UPI) network.
UPI-based transactions have been rising and the growth can be attributed to the ease of operations. A user can move funds from one bank account to another bank account at no extra cost and it is faster than national electronic funds transfer (NEFT) or other traditional methods.
There is no waiting time to add a beneficiary and an individual is not even required to share his bank account details and IFSC code as the mobile number itself works as a unique identifier.