Paytm clocks over USD 1.6 billion during festive season; registers 3.5X growth

India's largest mobile payments and commerce platform, Paytm, announced that over USD 1.6 billion worth of payments were processed on its platform during Diwali season, which started from Sept. 20 until Oct. 20.

The platform witnessed a 3.5X increase in online and offline payments during the festive season as more consumers used its payments service during the same period as compared to 2016.

Paytm registered growth across all its payment use-cases and categories. Food outlets, transportation and offline retailers have contributed the most to the overall surge in transactions, with more than 60 percent of the incoming growth from tier II and tier III cities.

While larger cities like New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune have experienced this transformation in payment behaviour, the trend is now being led by smaller cities and towns like Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Mysore and Vishakhapatnam among others where local vendor communities continue to embrace Paytm in their daily lives.

This trend was repeated on Diwali and Bhai Dooj weekend, which saw a 2X increase in transactions as compared to last year.

The company has earmarked over Rs. 250 crores during this period to bring the next leap of mobile payments growth across the country.

"Mobile payments have become mainstream over the last few quarters. Owing to the convenience and security, people prefer Paytm to a card and other modes of payments," said COO Paytm, Kiran Vasireddy.

"It's encouraging to see that a majority of growth in offline payments is from smaller towns and cities. This has resulted in over USD 1.6 billion worth of transactions in a month, making this the largest Diwali for mobile payments in India," added Vasireddy.

Paytm was the first company to invest in QR-based payments and its unique scan-to-pay user flow is fast becoming ubiquitous with mobile payments across the country.

More than five million merchants across India accept Paytm.

The company's strong merchant onboarding efforts combined with its zero cost payment solution, large customer base and breadth of use cases has enabled it to build the largest and fastest-growing payment network in the country.