Paytm – India's Most ValuableStartup
After demonetization, one thing that comes to the mind of everyIndia while shopping is "Paytm Karo."Paytm has brought a shift in the model of retail industry by changing thepayment methodology completely. In its initial days, this online wallet andm-commerce platform was only used to make limited payments like mobilerecharge, DTH recharge and shopping bills. Since then Paytm has grown its scopeand brought almost everything that can come under its operations.
Users can use paytm to pay electricity and water bills, rechargetheir metro cards, book tickets of bus, train and flight as well, book hotel, eventransfer money to any bank account and many more. Expanding their e-retail andm-commerce stores have added to the success story of Paytm as this allowedsmall and medium vendors to list their products on their platform and increasesales.
About Paytm
Paytm is a subsidiary company of One97 Communications and waslaunched in August 2010 by Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Started as an online billpayment and mobile recharge application, Paytm now allows its user to makealmost any kind of payment with a couple of clicks. They have a user base ofover 300 million users in the last 9 years.
Alibaba groups, Alipay, Silicon Valley Bank, Sapphire venture andSAIF partners are major investors in Paytm. They generate their revenue fromadvertisements on the website and application, commission on fund transfersfrom e-wallets to bank accounts, Escrow account maintained in a nationalizedbank and commission from utility bill payments and other recharges.
Growth Revolution
Paytm is the most favoured digital payment platform in India becauseof its user-friendly interface and top security features. It is also an RBI(Reserve Bank of India) approved e-wallet which means money of the user is safeunder the Escrow account with a nationalized bank. Paytm also make sure that thepersonal information of the user like the password and other financial detailsare secured therefore they use Verisign-certified Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)128-bit encryption technology.
They not only have a secure payment system but it is strong as well.It handles almost 5000 transaction per second which is remarkable. Majority ofthe transaction has been made possible because of their easy yet effective andsecure payment method. Users can pay by scanning the QR code of the given shopor by simply putting the mobile number of the recipient. They also allow itsuser to park their money in the app and pay from the wallet or directly fromthe bank.
Government decision of demonetization was the best thing happened toPaytm. It forced the public to shift to plastic money or digital payments andbeing a pioneer in that domain it gains massive popularity. According to stats,Paytm has surpassed its competition such as Mobikwik, Freecharge and othere-commerce platforms in terms of user base and revenue.
One of the major successes for Paytm is that it is not only popularin big cities but also small towns of India. Gradually, it is becoming the mostfavoured mode of payment amount the population.
Plans for expansion
Paytm has almost 26 per cent of the market share among the e-paymentplatforms. They are now planning to expand into the loan market and disbursesmall loans to around 500 million people. There is a plan to expand Paytm Bankwhich was launched in May 2017 to the physical presence of the payment banks.
Paytm are also going to give a major competition to WhatsApp bylaunching a chat application with more interesting features. To enhance theuser experience in both online and offline platform Paytm has acquired Shifuand Near.in.
Achievements and Awards
Paytm is enjoying an enormous success; therefore it has won variousawards around the world in the field of digital payment and e-commerce. Here isa list of achievements and awards earned by Paytm:
Conclusion
Paytm is fully dedicated to enhance their product and services sothat they can improve user experience. Their talented team always endeavours toinclude small but effective features in their platform. The story of Paytm isinspiring to all and many young entrepreneurs can learn from its success aswell as failures.
