Paytm to enable five million merchants to leapfrog into digital payments by 2017

Paytm has today announced that it will enable five million merchants to leapfrog to digital payments in 2017. It has launched an array of new features to enhance security and increase usability both for consumers and merchants.

The company has also started working upstream with distribution networks in order to enable merchants who accept Paytm do business with their suppliers as well.

In the last 45 days, Paytm has introduced several new features to enable every

Indian to accept and pay using Paytm.

The company identified the need to localize their app so that consumers in tier II and tier III towns could use Paytm more comfortably and launched their android app in 10 regional languages Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya and Punjabi.

To provide additional safety to the users, Paytm launched an 'App Password'

feature on Android. With this feature, users can set a secure Pin, password, Pattern or Fingerprint as a means to ensure money stored in the Paytm wallet remains safe even if the owner's phone is lost or misplaced.

"We are committed to solving everyday problems with technology as our teams constantly receive feedback and implement new features to enable users. We have upgraded our system capacity to ensure a seamless experience for our users, even though there are a few hick ups coming due to congestion in bank networks. Our transfer to bank charges are zero percent and will remain so with the launch of the payments bank," said VP Paytm, Sudhanshu Gupta.

The company's extensive sales team which are spread across cities and district head quarter towns have already enabled 1.5 million merchants.

Paytm now aims to also enable the distributor and suppliers of these retailers to receive payments from these merchants in order to fully cover the distribution network.

"While our large field teams work on educating and on-boarding merchants to accept Paytm, we understand that it is a need for our retailers to also be able to pay their suppliers digitally and we are working towards that. We are enabling sabzi mandis to accept Paytm and are also working with sales and distribution companies to bring their networks onboard," added Sudhanshu.