Scoring big due to government’s demonetization move, the digital payments major Paytm is now planning to bulk up its technological payment solutions. Thus, the company now plans to invest around ₹600 crore over the course of next 10 months in the expansion of its QR code-based payment system.
With such payment solutions in its arsenal, the company is aiming to add 10 million new merchants on the platform, enabled with QR codes across 650 districts. Also, the company has set itself a goal of achieving this target by December this year.
The investment of over ₹600 crores will be utilized by the company in scaling up manpower, technology infrastructure and cashback offers. It will also spend money on merchant education to enable more users and merchants to transact digitally for the first time and become a part of the digital economy.
The Noida-based payments and mobile commerce company first came up with this QR code-based payment service in October 2015. Through this, it allows customers to scan a code with their smartphone and instantly transfer fund, or send payment to merchants. In a statement, Kiran Vasireddy, Senior VP at Paytm, said,
Our 0% merchant transaction fee coupled with an aggressive merchant acquisition rate, will help us take QR code-based payments to every nook and corner of this country.
As per the numbers revealed by the company, its QR code-based payment solution is currently being used by more than five million merchants. The adoption of such transactions grew dramatically after the government’s demonetization move late last year.
This type of payment option is accepted at lots of different places, including at kirana stores, toll booths, food courts, hospitals, large retail outlets, petrol pumps, among others. As per the company, it gets 65% of overall transactions on its platform through QR codes.
Unlike other PoS machines, QR codes have zero transaction charges and have no cost of installation. While there is no cost of set-up or hardware, the merchant has to pay a minimal transfer fee at the time of transferring money from the Paytm account into the bank account.
In order to get more merchants on board, the company has rolled out its mobile application in 10 Indian languages—Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya and Punjabi. After the introduction of local languages, the company claims to have witnessed a five-fold increase in traffic from smaller towns.
