Mobile Wallet provider Paytm is going to invest Rs 500 crores to conduct merchant training and awareness initiatives to scale up its scale up its value in the country. Paytm is expecting to cover 1 crore more merchants in the upcoming 3-6 months.
Paytm’s vice president Amit Veer reported on Monday, “In the last one and a half years, we already have over 60 lakh merchants on board and want to take this number to one crore within a quarter or two from now. We are confident the rate of adoption will increase further as our merchants can now accept payments from Paytm (wallet), UPI (Unified Payments Interface) or cards at zero cost.”
Currently, company’s QR-based supports all methods of payment including credit/debit cards, net banking, Paytm-BHIM UPI, and its wallet. The Company now aims to target six-fold growth in offline (QR code-based) payments by mid-2018. He also added, “We have invested a lot to build a field force of 10,000 people who are reaching out to merchants in various cities to make sure that the merchants get training and QR code.”
The new Paytm-BHIM UPI is now enabling merchant partners to directly accept payments to their respective bank accounts in India without any charges. He also assumed that the average ticket size of the transactions on the platforms expected to go up.
“In the offline space, the average size of the transaction is about Rs 500. With UPI, cards on the Paytm platform, lot of large ticket transactions which did not happen earlier on the platform, has began happening now. This will definitely push the ticket size up,” the vice-president said. According to him, the wallet service provider recorded about 10 million transactions a day including both online and offline and of which, about 60 percent was from offline space.