The company has been lately scaling newer horizons such as investment advisory and insurance as it is locked in a fierce battle with Google and WhatsApp on the online payment business.
Online payment aggregator Paytm has crossed the USD 20 billion mark in terms of annual gross transaction value, which is a fourfold increase from March 2017, The Economic Times reported.
The huge upswing in transaction value comes as a result of the company's foray into newer ventures such as travel and movie ticketing.
“Last year, we were doing USD 5 billion worth of transactions, which has now grown to USD 20 billion,” Kiran Vasireddy, Chief Operating Officer, Paytm, told the newspaper.
The company will soon surpass the one billion transactions mark every quarter, looking at the figures for the month of February.
Paytm has lately been exploring new territory with verticals like investment advisory and insurance, as it is locked in a fierce battle with Google and WhatsApp on the online payment business front.
The company has also forayed into previously uncharted waters with businesses like toll payment at highways, tiffin service providers in Mumbai, and even local shopkeepers, resulting in the company’s average transaction value shooting up by 50 percent to USD 5 from USD 3.3 earlier.
“Our offline merchant base has grown to 7 million from 1 million at the beginning of 2017. About 50 percent of these merchants are from beyond the top cities. We have offline merchants in 600 districts across the country,” Vasireddy said.
The numbers are stellar considering the fact that the total number of transactions at various point-of-sale (PoS) terminals using debit cards in January stood at 300 million, according to the RBI. In comparison, Paytm has been achieving 300 million transactions consistently in recent months.
To the uninitiated, gross transaction value does not pertain to profits or revenue, and only indicates the gross value of all the goods and services transacted during a given period of time.
The company recently clarified that RBI's mandate, which has made it compulsory for digital wallet service providers to verify each and every customer, has only had a minimal impact on its customer base.
At the time RBI mandated the KYC guidelines, experts saw a reduction of 80-90 percent in users from the database.
In fact, according to Vasireddy, the company had initiated the KYC process even before RBI mandated KYC. “We had already embarked on the KYC process for our customers for our banking activities and we have developed a large network that was used to get the KYC of our users, hence the move has not impacted us,” he said.