Paytm’s Monthly Transactions Climb To 1.2 Billion

Paytm

India-based Paytm said it reached 1.2 billion monthly transactions in February as eCommerce continued its boom in that country. India’s Economic Times reported that Paytm is also joining up with Ola and private lender IndusInd Bank to seek a new umbrella entity (NUE) license from the Reserve Bank of India and set up its own national payment network.

The company said the volume of transactions was consistent with January, but did not disclose that month’s numbers. Paytm takes credit for processing digital payments across 500,000 villages and providing training to more than 2 million merchants.

The company was valued at $16 billion during a 2019 funding round, according to a Reuters report.

“We could very well break even this year,” Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said at the Reuters Next conference on Jan. 13. Sharma said that while Paytm had no near-term plans to go public, it might consider it once it is profitable.

The FinTech startup is moving toward profitability.

Up until now, India has clung to counting itself as a cash-based economy. Even consumers shopping online often paid via cash on delivery (COD).

“We created our payments product to go wide and deep for customers — they can pay their school fees, order food, order up an Uber,” Paytm President Madhur Deora told PYMNTS in an interview. “The user can take all those payments they can make from the Paytm app and build a hub [to] manage their life issues.”

Paytm’s growth has been aided by a regulatory push and the increasing presence of India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

Paytm offers a wide array of digital products throughout India, including a merchant payment platform, money transfers and bill payments. It also provides lending services such as merchant cash loans, personal loans and credit cards.

Deora said Paytm started as a payments project, but now has bigger ambitions around building an entire consumer ecosystem where users can manage their lives end to end without having to flip through a host of apps.