Bengaluru: While the rest of us went into a panic about the government’s decision to scrap Rs 1000 and Rs 500 notes the chief of a mobile payments and ecommerce company Paytm was smiling all the way to the bank!
In the eight days since the cash squeeze, the Alibaba-backed Paytm saw nearly 50 million downloads on Google’s Play Store and registered over 5 million transactions a day.
The move, demonetization, gave Paytm “a great big break”, as its CFO, Madhur Deora puts it, rubbishing criticisms. Talking exclusively to DC, Mr. Deora throws light on Paytm’s booming business, demonetization and his company’s quest to immediately solve the issues around it. “In the short term, of course, there will be some inconvenience because a larger number of people have always used cash in the country,” said Mr. Deora on the sidelines of the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Bengaluru on Wednesday.
To bring more and more merchants and customers on board, Paytm also launched its app in ten vernacular languages. “The problem is not just for the English speakers. We have seen an increase of 700 % in the overall traffic ever since we launched our app in ten regional languages,” said the CFO.
The company has seen a “10x increase” in the amount of money added to Paytm and the number of app downloads has gone up by 300% as well.
For Mr. Deora, selling Paytm has become much easier since having a safe cashless payment system has become a priority for many merchants in the country. “We have been adding over 20,000 merchants every day, while launching a new feature called ‘Nearby’, which helps customers to find shops, nearby that accept Paytm,” said Mr. Deora.
On the growth of his business, Mr. Deora said that a large number of retailers, labs and pharmacies have also been registering themselves on Paytm with immediate effect to avoid incurring losses.
The company has made it simple for merchants to download and register themselves on Paytm. “Making the interface much simpler was difficult but we were very clear as to what to do. The merchant can download our app, sign up and start receiving payments through our platform. They can use the Paytm wallet money to pay bills, fees or transfer the amount to their account using the ‘Passbook’ feature,” explained Mr. Deora.
