How Paytm QR Codes revolutionised digital payments in India
Today Indian smartphone users pay for their meals, grocery, bills or any other service with Quick-Response (QR) codes. However, it all started when Paytm became the first Indian company to integrate payments into this QR and took it to every neighbourhood store. We hired 10,000 agents during demonetisation to expand our offline merchant network and strengthen our onboarding team. The tagline “Paytm Karo” soon became synonymous with digital payments in India.
Our success in the digital payments space from various day-to-day payment use-cases to Paytm QR — has attracted American giants like Google and Facebook’s Whatsapp to jump on the digital payments bandwagon. The Economic Times recently reported that Google Pay and Phonepe are increasingly looking at offline payments and trying to capture a market share which is primarily dominated by us. Offline payments have also become an area of debate as the government has proposed zero charges on all forms of digital payments to encourage adoption.
We are committed to provide our users with new-age financial services and have registered over 250 million monthly transactions through our QR in the first quarter of FY20. This is more than all other QR-based payments on different platforms put together.
Taking a look at our journey so far, we launched our innovative Paytm QR in 2015 that enabled customers to simply scan with their smartphones and pay to the merchant. The Paytm QR revolutionised the entire digital payments industry and millions of people adopted it across the country, right from the local kirana stores, auto-rickshaws and fast food joints to top-end hotels and restaurants. We feel pride in seeing that its popularity has inspired many other digital payments companies, including the UPI to adopt QR-based payment method.
With more than 12 million merchants on board, we continue to be the digital payments leader in India and have witnessed 3x growth in the last one year, including both online and offline payments. This all would not have been possible without your support and we thank our customers for making us the leader in the digital payments industry.
