India's Paytm hits 200 million mobile wallet users

In a rustic the place money continues to be king, a cellular app that gives on-line transactions is seeing 700,000 new customers be a part of the platform every day.

India’s Paytm has hit 200 million pockets customers, CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma stated Monday.

With this milestone reached, Sharma can also be setting his firm a brand new aim to get half a billion Indians to do on-line transactions utilizing his app within the subsequent 4 years. 

Despite the fact that the six-year-old cellular pockets app has been pretty in style amongst city Indians for years, it wasn’t till November final yr when prime minister Narendra Modi declared the overwhelming majority of cash invalid within the nation that its relevance skyrocketed.

For Indians, greater than 80 % of whom prefer hard-cash to do any sort of transaction, cellular pockets app corporations together with Paytm in addition to rivals Freecharge and MobiKwik, have emerged as a aid. 

Two days after Modi’s speech, Paytm stated it had noticed a 435 percent upward spike in traffic, and 200 % improve in app obtain numbers. Lower than two weeks later, it was dealing with over seven billion transactions every day, more than those by all credit and debit cards within the nation mixed. 

As of March final yr, there were about 24.5 million bank cards in India, and 661.eight million debits playing cards.

Small retailers are warming to Paytm.

Paytm is shortly turning into ubiquitous within the nation. Not solely does almost each on-line service help Paytm, however extra importantly, small retailers reminiscent of auto rickshaw drivers, roadside stalls, vegetable distributors are more and more accepting funds by way of Paytm.

“At Paytm, our aim is to assist retailers and shoppers transact digitally at zero additional value. Reaching 200 million registered customers and greater than half one million customers each day is a superb showcase of the nation’s belief in our cost answer and reaffirms our perception within the want for a fast and straightforward cashless cost technique,” Deepak Abbot, SVP at Alibaba-backed Paytm stated in a press assertion. 

One other method to take a look at Paytm’s sudden rise is its founder’s new objectives. In August 2015, when Paytm hit 100 million customers, the corporate was seeing 75 million transactions every month. 

In December of final yr, the app did greater than 200 million transactions, with the founder hoping to do two billion transactions in 2017.