The battle to win over the fin-tech space in India has been rising. Ever since the government announced the demonetization move last year, the fin-tech startups in India have seen a tremendous rise.
However, the companies in this space are now looking beyond online-only users and are trying to leverage the offline channels to boost transactions of the platform.
In a similar move, Paytm has been focusing on the offline channels since quite some time in order to increase the count of merchants on its payments platform.
Now, the company is reporting that it has witnessed a rise of over 65 percent in offline transactions during the festive season of Diwali. Notably, the company had reported offline transactions below 20 percent in last year’s festive period.
Commenting on this, Kiran Vasireddy, COO, Paytm, said:
Offline growth has happened in the last one year after demonetisation, with Paytm acquiring over 5 million merchants with QR code acceptance in one year. It’s encouraging to see that a majority of growth in offline payments is from smaller towns and cities. This has resulted in over $1.6 billion worth of transactions in a month, making this the largest Diwali for mobile payments in India.
In a statement, Paytm said that overall, it processed $1.6 billion worth of transactions during the festive month, with a 3.5x increase in volumes over last year. The numbers are for the Paytm only and does not include transactions from its e-commerce arm Paytm Mall.
Some of the biggest use cases for Paytm during the month included payments at food outlets, transportation, among others. Paytm had earmarked over ₹250 crore for marketing and promotions during the festive season.