Paytm earmarks Rs 200 crore and 10,000-member team to push UPI usage

Paytm, which claims more than 33 percent market share in UPI payments, is attempting to position Paytm UPI as India's leading payments solution. 

In a statement on Monday, Indian payments major Paytm said it had invested Rs 200 crore in a new festive marketing campaign to increase awareness around its convenience and enable more users to adopt Paytm UPI for instant money transfers.

Meanwhile, in the offline space, the company has dedicated a 10,000-member team to work closely with offline merchants, encouraging them and their customers to pay using Paytm UPI for their offline festive purchases.

With the wide availability of online services and offline merchant network throughout the country accepting UPI payments, the company aims to achieve 100 million UPI users by the end of December 2018.

Speaking on the investment, Deepak Abbot, Senior Vice President, Paytm, said,

“The festive season is a valuable opportunity for us to introduce more and more users to the convenience of Paytm UPI for their online and offline purchases. We have always strived towards simplifying payments through our digital solutions and now we aim for Paytm UPI to lead in both online as well as offline purchases.”

In the month of September, the total number of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions in the country stood at 405.87 million, up 30 percent from August, when the total number of transactions was around 312 million.

Paytm had then in a statement said it had powered close 137 million of these transactions, claiming almost 33 percent market share. It further said that more than 20 percent of all payments on Paytm in September were made using BHIM UPI.