Paytm opens office in Vishakhapatnam, to add over 1,000 offline agents in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana

Paytm announced on Saturday that it has instituted a new corporate office in the coastal city of Visakhapatnam.

The company claims that the decision was made owing to a strong surge in payment transactions across all major cities in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana (including Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam and Hyderabad).

To support the growing demand for cashless solutions in the region, Paytm has also announced that it will add over 1,000 offline agents to its Andhra Pradesh and Telangana team. 

At present, Paytm claims to have a ground sales and activation staff of 12,000 individuals and has plans to take this number to 20,000 individuals.

Speaking at the launch, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder-CEO, Paytm said,

Our Vishakhapatnam campus is a showcase of our commitment to the region’s development and reflects its importance as an important market for us. We will ensure there are more merchants across Andhra Pradesh accepting Paytm than ever before.

During the inauguration, the company also announced waiving off its 1 percent transaction fee for transferring money to the banks. The decision was made to facilitate and accelerate the ongoing shift in customer and merchant behavior towards going cashless.

According to Paytm, over 1.5 million offline merchants across India are using their payment platform. The company confirmed that 17 percent of its customer base comes from small towns (population of less than 3000 people); 43 percent from Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities (population of 100,000 - 1 million), and the remaining 40 percent from metros (population of above 1 million).

Going at the current rate, the company is confident to complete 2 billion transactions by end of 2016.

Almost a week ago in a press conference, Paytm announced their partnership with technologies from India Stack.

While Paytm at present claims to be processing an average of 5 million transactions on its wallet everyday, the real focus for the company lies on releasing their much-awaited payments bank.

This explains their strategy of partnering with the India Stack and releasing payments on Unified Payments Interface (UPI) as a feature. Once activated this makes Paytm, a mine of transaction data.

Payment banks are allowed to collect deposits without participating in lending activity. Paytm’s partner bank might invest these deposits in government securities. And the company will be allowed to cross-sell all of the bank’s services like mutual funds and insurance.