Alibaba-backed PayTM has today revealed that it has achieved a dinosaurous (yup, thats the word for it folks) 122 million active users on its platform, which is a whooping five-fold increase in the number of active users in just one year, and perhaps one of the largest for an Indian consumer internet firm.
Peng Yijie, Director of International Business at Ant Financial, has revealed that the active users of Paytm reached 122 million by the end of March. The numbers signified about 5.6 times increase from the numbers in the beginning of 2015.
Ant Financial, an investment arm of China’s Alibaba, is the largest investor in Paytm as of now and holds a majority stake within the company. Paytm has raised over $585 million in funding from various investors as of now.
Flipkart, on the other hand has over 50 million monthly active mobile users on its platform, almost three times that of Snapdeal and Amazon India, according to its investor – Naspers.
Even with diversified business, Paytm is achieving milestones in every vertical it steps its foot. Paytm’s utility bill payments segment is witnessing 200% MoM growth and the company is now eying over $2 billion in GMV. The payments business has even turned profitable, as revealed by Vijay Sharma a couple of months ago.
Its digital wallet service has also come a long, long, really long way and the company is now pushing for a cashless economy in the country. For that, it is betting big on the offline presence and is pushing its wallet payment service to local stores and is aiming to reach 4 million merchants by the year end.
In its continued aggressive push to get more users involved, Paytm is also forging partnership with various other companies in order to integrate its service on their platform. It has partnered with companies like Uber, PVR, INOX, among other, which gives these partners paytm’s top-of-the-shelf mobile wallet service, and in turn giving Paytm, access to its partners’ userbase.
Paytm is also soon going to launch its payment bank business after receiving a RBI license for the same last year. The company is on a hiring spree for the same and had already hired a new CEO couple of months ago. Currently, the payment bank business team has around 60 members and the company is looking to expand its team to over 1500 people in coming 12 months.
However, even though the company has revealed an impressive monthly active user base, what will be more interesting to see, is the company’s transaction value and volume. It’ll also be notable to see the average transaction value, as this would give us better insights on how the company is progressing on financial terms.
