After demonetization, one thing that comes to the mind of every India while shopping is "Paytm Karo."Paytm has brought a shift in the model of the retail industry by changing the payment methodology completely.
In its initial days, this online wallet and-commerce platform was only used to make limited payments like mobile recharge, DTH recharge, and shopping bills. Since then Paytm has grown its scope and brought almost everything that can come under its operations.
Users can use Paytm to pay electricity and water bills, recharge their metro cards, book tickets for the bus, train, and flights as well, book hotels, even transfer money to any bank account and many more.
Expanding their e-retail and -commerce stores has added to the success story of Paytm as this allowed small and medium vendors to list their products on their platform and increase sales.
Paytm is a subsidiary company of One97 Communications and was launched in August 2010 by Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
Starting as an online bill payment and mobile recharge application, Paytm now allows its user to make almost any kind of payment with a couple of clicks. They have a user base of over 300 million users in the last 9 years.
Alibaba groups, Alipay, Silicon Valley Bank, Sapphire Venture, and SAIF partners are major investors in Paytm.
They generate their revenue from advertisements on the website and application, commission on fund transfers from e-wallets to bank accounts, Escrow accounts maintained in a nationalized bank, and commission from utility bill payments and other recharges.
Paytm is the most favored digital payment platform in India because of its user-friendly interface and top security features. It is also an RBI(Reserve Bank of India) approved e-wallet which means the money of the user is safe under the Escrow account with a nationalized bank.
Paytm also makes sure that the personal information of the user like the password and other financial details are 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 transactions per second which is remarkable. The majority of the transaction has been made possible because of their easy yet effective and secure payment method.
Users can pay by scanning the QR code of the given shop by simply putting the mobile number of the recipient. They also allow its user to park their money in the app and pay from the wallet or directly from the bank.
The government's decision of demonetization was the best thing that happened to Paytm. It forced the public to shift to plastic money or digital payments and being a pioneer in that domain it gains massive popularity.
According to stats, Paytm has surpassed its competition such as Mobikwik, Freecharge, and other-commerce platforms in terms of user base and revenue.
One of the major successes for Paytm is that it is not only popular in big cities but also small towns in India. Gradually, it is becoming the most favoured mode of payment amount the population.
Paytm has almost 26 percent of the market share among the e-payment platforms. They are now planning to expand into the loan market and disburse small loans to around 500 million people.
There is a plan to expand Paytm Bank which was launched in May 2017 to the physical presence of the payment banks.
Paytm is also going to give major competition to WhatsApp by launching a chat application with more interesting features. To enhance the user experience in both online and offline platforms Paytm has acquired Shifuand Near. in.
Paytm is enjoying enormous success; therefore it has won various awards around the world in the field of digital payment and e-commerce. Here is a list of achievements and awards earned by Paytm:
Award for SABRE Awards 2017 company of the Year
Award for SABRE Awards 2017 of SuperiorAchievement In Reputation Management SABRE Awards 2017
Financial Professional Services at SABRE Awards 2017
Vijay Shekhar Sharma was included among the 50 Most Influential Young Indians by GQ
Entrepreneur India Awards 2017-Vijay Shekhar Sharma
Vijay Shekhar Sharma was included in the 2017 Time 100 List of Most Influential People in the World
Recognized as the Entrepreneur of of the Year at The Entrepreneur's Money-tech Awards 2017
Vijay Shekhar Sharma was awarded the Data Quest IT Person of the Year
Vijay Shekhar Sharma was mentioned in Forbes Top 40 under 40 Award
Award from the 11th IAMAI IndiaDigital Summit for The Best DigitalWallet award
Award from the 11th IAMAI IndiaDigital Summit for The Best Consumer Mobile Service award
Paytm is fully dedicated to enhancing their product and services so that it can improve user experience. Their talented team always endeavors to include small but effective features in their platform.
The story of Paytm is inspiring to all and many young entrepreneurs can learn from its success as well as failures.
