The purpose of Paytm as a Digital Payment Transactor:
People love to spend their money in the form of digital wallets, cards, or online transactions instead of paying it using hard cash. The reason being it lessens the burden of keeping hard cash everywhere and secondly, it’s a quicker process where the vendor receives the money within seconds. It also removes the headache of giving the right amount of change to the vendor, which has repeatedly asked everywhere.
Paytm is the most prominent and trustworthy online transaction app in India, and it has been so popular that starting from small-time vendors that are using it to large-scale business traders for money transactions.
Paytm also helps in paying your bills and other expenditures at shops, malls, restaurants, and many more. It offers a simple, secure, and swift online transaction and attracts many customers with its cashback offers.
The Advent of Paytm in Indian Markets:
Paytm lets the users create their private account and keeps it secure from online frauds once the users have completed the KYC verification. KYC can be abbreviated as Know Your Customer.
It is a natural process where you have to submit your necessary documents which prove your identity such as driving license, voter card, aadhaar card or passport. This step is initiated by the Startup to ensure no online scams or frauds can trouble the customer.
It allows the customers to spend their money on a daily transaction limit of 10,000. It also supplies the vendors with an individual merchant account where vendors can pay up to 1 lakh rupees on online transaction daily. The Daily transaction limit on Paytm is 10,000 INR. There is a separate merchant account for the merchant’s, where the transaction limit is up to 1 lakh (100,000 INR).
In the year 2010, during August eminent business enthusiast, Mr. Vijay Shekhar launched this Startup, which first started as a prepaid mobile recharge and a DTH online recharge platform.
It was during the time of demonetization, Paytm started to spread its roots and initiated the online banking system. It provided a more natural way to transact money during this period, which can be done by the usage of the person’s number, his QR code, and even his bank details.
Why is Paytm different compared to other Mobile Wallets:
It has also associated itself into many social initiatives such as donating money for flood victims or helping relief camps where people with their freewill can give money to such institutions.
Over the years, it has shown itself as one of the best platforms to serve the needy and weak with the help of like-minded persons. It has also started a unique service named as the ‘Paytm Payments Bank‘, which is designed and works as most of the regular banks work.
With the advent of smartphones and mobile networks becoming more and more accessible, even in remote areas, the telecom sector in India started improving. It was then, Vijay Shekhar Sharma began to ponder in an idea of creating an application which facilitated mobile banking, which would cater to the needs of the masses.
Much to his amusement, his investors found the idea lackluster and deemed it unworthy. He did not get disheartened by this, and he invested around 2 million dollars and launched Paytm and the rest we can see what has happened in the mobile banking sector.
Headquartered in Noida, India, Paytm has accounted for providing many benefits to the customers such as event bookings, mobile recharges, utility bill payments along with giving in-store payments in many malls and shops for spending on grocery items, fruits and vegetables and also in tolls, pharmacies, educational institutions, and restaurants wherein customers can pay the vendor quickly with its unique Paytm QR-Code.
Some of the notable contributions and benefits provided by Paytm are as follows:
1. In the year 2013, it helped the customers in paying for their data cards, post-paid and prepaid mobile recharges and landline bills.
2. In the year 2015, and in January, the lucrative ‘Paytm Wallet‘ was launched. Payment options of Uber and Indian Railways were also added in the same year.
3. In the same year, it unveiled more payment options, such as paying for metro recharges, gas, electricity, and water bills. Its most significant achievement was when India’s leading businessman, the chairman of Tata Motors, Mr. Ratan Tata invested in it.
4. As stated earlier, it was during the time of demonetization in the year 2016, which helped Paytm establish itself as one of the bankable brands in mobile banking. The banning of 500 and 1000 rupees note made these mobile wallets an alternate source of money and also helped in easing the pace of online banking. Once it got established everywhere due to this, Paytm started its new feature wherein it provided customers with the liberty to book movie tickets, amusement park, and event ticketing along with the travel bookings which included flights also. This feature helped in increasing the downloads of the Paytm app up to a staggering 200%.
5. In the year 2017, it started to register enormous success when Paytm became the first mobile application to cross over 100 million downloads across all platforms, which mainly included Google Play Store and Apple Store.
When its consumer base started to increase, it launched the ‘Paytm Payments Bank‘ to ease its work process and also to facilitate quicker consumer interaction.
6. It founded the ‘Paytm for Business‘ mobile application, which was specifically designed and structured for vendors and traders in the year March 2018. This step of Paytm helped in enlarging its network within the merchants and traders to over 7 million.
Paytm is growing tremendously over a couple of years, and it has recorded an astonishing number of an additional 20 million registered users in India as per their existing records.
They have redesigned both their website and app into an e-commerce application which provides numerous benefits to the customers in different fields such as sports and health, electronics, books, home and kitchen, fashion and footwear, babies and toys and many more flowing merchant sites. The noteworthy feature of Paytm is that they modify from time to time, which has been the reason for their success over recent years.
The Investments and Acquisitions of Paytm to date:
As stated earlier, Paytm was scrapped by most of the investors who made its founder himself invest around 2 million dollars for starting it. It was after it made its mark in the payments market; it began to get its new share of investors. In the year 2015, Mr. Ratan Tata, Chairman of Tata Motors, invested a significant amount of money by predicting its massive success shortly.
In the same year, in March, Alibaba invested an amount of $575 million in One97 Communications, the parent company of Paytm through its Ant subsidiary. Since then, further investments have made on Paytm time to time, which may account to around $800 million although both the company and the investors are unaware of the exact amounts.
Paytm acquired the mini-startup Plustxt for less than $2 million in the year 2013. Plustxt was a mini-startup which was founded by Lohith V, Parag Arora, Lokesh Chauhan, and Pratyush Prasanna. The founders were all former IIT graduates. The primary purpose why Plustxt started was to allow quick and swift text messaging services in any Indian language.
In the year 2015, Paytm moved on in acquiring Jugnoo, which was an auto-rickshaw aggregator and a hyperlocal delivery firm. Paytm invested an enormous amount of around $5 million in this Startup. These funds were allocated to help Jugnoo in elevating its number of operations across the country and also to enhance its driver efficiency.
Paytm also acquired the local services startup Near.in and another Delhi-based startup Shifu, which was primarily a prediction platform on consumer behavior.
Paytm started to increase its base through acquisitions and invested in logistics startups like XpressBess and Loginext in the year 2016. During April 2017, it began to invest in startups promoting healthcare and fitness such as QorQl. QorQl was a startup which made the use of artificial intelligence and big data for assisting the doctors in enhancing their quality of care and productivity. This Startup also helped the patients in managing their health in a better way.
In 2017, the month of July, it started to acquire startups based on online ticketing and vents platforms such as Insider.in, and an event management company named Only Much Louder and MobiQuest which was a mobile loyalty startup.
Little and Nearby, two more startups were acquired in the same year by Paytm, and it merged both of them into a single startup. Recently, in June 2018, it acquired another startup named Cube26.
Some of the Prestigious Awards secured by Paytm:
1. In 2014: At the MMA Smarties Awards, Paytm won the silver winner in the m-commerce category and it also received the gold winner in the mobile app category. In the same year, at the mobility solutions category, it was awarded the Indian Express IT award.
2. In 2015: In the B2C segment, Paytm bagged the prestigious award as the ‘Mobile Commerce Company of the Year’ which was bestowing the Frost and Sullivan India ICT award. As a disruptive digital innovator, it was bestowed with the ‘Best Digital Wallet Award’ on 15th January at the prestigious India Digital Awards, the hosting of which was in Delhi.
3. In 2016: At the Forbes Leadership Awards it bagged the ‘Outstanding Startup of the Year’ award, and in the same year it also won the highly honored ‘Most Trusted Brand of the Year’ award from ET Brand Equity.
4. In 2017: At the India Digital Summit, it got awarded the ‘Best Consumer Mobile Service Award,’ and at SABRE Awards held in the same year it bagged the Gold SABRE award for its outstanding financial and professional services. At the same event, it also won the Diamond SABRE award as well under the same category.
Paytm has significantly been a domestic operation so far. Which essentially means that is has been in operation most predominantly only in India and other Asian Markets. But plans are going on in the sector to develop Paytm as a brand internationally. The projects have also started to work out with Paytm extending its base to Toronto, Canada in the year 2014.
So slowly, but surely Paytm is going to resound its success in the international markets as it did in Indian domestic markets. It has its goals set to increase its user base to around 500 million users globally and is thriving hard to reach that number as well as that goal. But as they say, more extensive the user base, more significant will be the number of work responsibilities, and larger will be trust bestowed upon them.
