Paytm To Invest Rs. 5000 Crores In Its Payments And Financial Services Business

The digital payment behemoth Paytm, is all set to make investments worth Rs. 5000 crores later this year. Alongside, the company is looking forward to doubling quarterly transactions from 1 billion per quarter to 2 billion per quarter by end of the year. With the rise of the digital payment platform, Paytm also intends to introduce new products and services. The Founder and CEO, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, said while there was an initial impact of a 10 to 15 per cent fall in transactions due to the Know Your Customer (KYC,) requirement in early March, the company recovered the numbers in March and grew again in April. The company also upgraded its Paytm services and fixed the money transfer issues that users were facing. However, the number of user transactions on Paytm every year increased from 18 in Jan 2017 to 34 in Jan 2018.

According to the company, creating new types of loans, newer types of insurance and a newest way of doing wealth management, will take time since it is a regulated environment where licences will be the key. Paytm have also partnered with ICICI Bank to launch post–paid services also. As of now, there are 100 million KYC wallets striving to bring more Indians under the services of financial and digital inclusion.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma also said the Reserve Bank of India’s KYC requirements impacted wallet to wallet P2P transactions for the company in March but in April the company sprung up again with Unified Payments Interface (UPI) also helping the cause. He added “One of the lucky things for us is that we started our KYC operations one year ago. We were building our model with financial services in mind much before the KYC obligation came on. It becomes onerous on an entity which is just in the payments business. Now the wallets are being issued by Paytm Payments Bank.”

The latest entrants into the digital payment path, from Google Tez to Instagram Payment everyone is trying to reach out to consumers to make payments more convenient. With digital payments all set to revolutionize in India, people are making the best use of e wallets.