Paytm has launched a new Point of Sale (PoS) device aimed at making payments at merchant establishments easier for the Paytm users. Paytm’s founder, Vijay Shekhar Sharma claims Paytm is not only the largest player in the merchant payments segment, but its numbers are higher than all others put together.
He says of the 9 million merchant payments processed in the country, 5 million are accounted for by Paytm alone.
The device that has been launched and the formal release done through the hands of Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani, is a stand that can be placed at the merchant establishments and includes the QR code for scanning. There is also a calculator and a USB charger. There is, in addition, a sound system that offers a voice confirmation of the transaction concluded. There is also an inbuilt scanner and printer. The device will be of great use to the merchant establishments since it has the software to manage inventory.
What’s more, the PoS machine permits merchant establishments to accept payments through debit and credit cards as well. Apart from Paytm, customers can use the other rival apps to settle their bills too. Its thus an all-in-one solution being offered by Paytm possibly to woo its merchant establishment customers.
Paytm also appears to be shifting focus to merchant payments rather than the peer-to-peer transactions, where players like Google Pay and PhonePe (now owned by Walmart) seem to have an upper hand.
They are all chasing the massive payments market in India, which is projected to be worth $1 trillion by the year 2023. Towards the end of 2016, when the Indian government went in for demonetization of particular bank notes and introduced alternate currency denominations, the digital payments took off at a blistering pace. Paytm was a beneficiary of this development and added a large subscriber base. After the currency situation eased up the growth rate in digital transactions dropped down. In the past year and over, however, there seems to be a trend picking up largely driven by the ecommerce firms like Amazon, Flipkart etc. and service providers like Swiggy and Uber. There is also a faster adoption of digital payments by the population in tier 2 and tier 3 cities in the country as the smartphone numbers increase and internet connectivity improves.
From Paytm’s perspective it has 16 million merchants both offline and online and it will try to take the best benefit out of this base.