Cash-rich global giants unable to compete with homegrown payments leader Paytm

With 550 crore transactions in the financial year 2018-19 and a gross transaction value (GTV) of over $50 billion (around Rs 34,706 crore), homegrown digital payments company Paytm continues to dominate its global counterparts — Google Pay, Whatsapp Pay and Walmart-Phonepe. The company attributes its growth to increased trust and adoption of the wide range of convenient use-cases available on its app such as utility payments, travel booking, recharges, movies and games.

With its network of over 1.2 crore merchants across the country, Paytm leads the offline retail payments segment, which Google Pay and Walmart-Phonepe are also trying to break into. Some recent incidents of data breach have increased user awareness on data security and data localisation resulting in more trust on homegrown apps.

Commenting on the the company’s performance, Deepak Abbot, Senior Vice President, Paytm said, “Our secure payments solutions are trusted by millions across all age groups for their day-to-day needs. We have built a network effect of various online and offline use-cases resulting in wide adoption and acceptance of Paytm as a super app.”

“Paytm dominates the digital payments in India with over 5 billion (500 crore) transactions in FY’19 and our aim is to achieve over 12 billion (1,200 crore) transactions by the end of this financial year. With 12 million (1.2 crore) partnered merchants, we aim to expand our network to 20 million (2 crore) merchants by this year-end,” he said.