Digital payments company Paytm on Wednesday announced integrating Rupay cards to its QR code for merchants to accept payments. Paytm’s QR code is already interoperable to receive payments from any of the existing UPI apps including PhonePe, GooglePay, Bhim etc., apart from Paytm wallet, credit and debit cards. “The merchant will now be able to accept payments from various payments modes not just from wallet or UPI but also from Rupay cards. It is the only QR code that has the availability of Rupay cards. All this at 0 per cent MDR charge,” said Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma at the launch of the all-in-one QR code.
Comments from PhonePe and Google Pay on Rupay card-based payments acceptance via their QR codes is awaited.
The QR code, which comes with the merchant’s Paytm for Business app, will allow them to accept unlimited payments from all modes even as they enjoy instant bank settlement, real-time notification for payments and single reconciliation for all payments. “Paytm is typically known to be a wallet and then in 2019, we added UPI instrument. Today we have added adding (instrument to it,” said Sharma adding that Paytm had more than 70 per cent share of 210 million transacting users in 2010, which is around 150 million users transacted using Paytm.
Also read: PhonePe tops other payment apps with highest growth in UPI transactions in 2019
Also, 2019 saw 26 billion payments including cards, mobile, and internet (RTGS/NEFT) of which 15 billion are total payments that merchants received such as a manufacturing service made payments to supplier or shop, said Sharma. The subset of this number, which is 9 billion are QR-led payments of which 5 billion were done through Paytm — a little around 55 per cent, added Sharma.
The total addressable digital payments market, according to Sharma, has about 500 million customers. Paytm has 15 million offline merchants out of which 10 million were active merchants. The company in its latest funding round last month had raised Rs 4724 crore (around $674 million) led by China’s Alipay, according to the RoC filings sourced from Tofler, reported by Financial Express. SoftBank and T Rowe Price also participated in the round.
