One97 Communications, which owns and operates digital payments service Paytm, has reported a marginal 1 per cent fall in its revenues and a 28 per cent decline in losses for the financial year 2019-20. While its revenues were down from Rs 3,391 crore in FY19 to Rs 3,350 crore in FY20, losses fell from Rs 3,954 crore to Rs 2,833 crore during the said period, according to the regulatory filing sourced from business intelligence platform Tofler. The company, which competes with Walmart’s PhonePe, Google Pay, MobiKwik, and now WhatsApp Payments as well in the digital payments space, was able to cut its expenses 19 per cent from Rs 7,254 crore in FY19 to Rs 5,861 crore in FY20.
Alibaba-backed Paytm had last year in November announced committing around $1.4 billion during the next three years to serve ‘financially underserved and unserved’ people in India. It had also raised $1 billion from SoftBank Vision Fund, Alibaba’s Ant Financials, and others during the same month at a $16 billion valuation, jumping from $10 billion in August 2018. In a September 2020 blog post, announcing its FY20 results, Paytm had said that the company is “on the path to being profitable by 2022” and had registered more than 17 million merchant partners.
The company had in January announced integrating Rupay cards to its QR code for merchants to accept payments. The QR code, which came with the merchant’s Paytm for Business app, allowed them to accept unlimited payments from all modes. It had also launched ‘all-in-one payment gateway’ and ‘Paytm business solutions’ for SMEs to help them streamline and digitise their business processes.
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Meanwhile, Paytm Payments Bank’s share in November UPI transactions stood at 11.8 per cent with 260 million transactions out of 2.2 billion transactions. Google Pay remained the dominant player with a 43.4 per cent UPI market share involving 960 million transactions. PhonePe with 39.4 per cent share was in the third spot while newly launched WhatsApp Payments scored only 0.31 million (3.1 lakh). The transaction value in the digital payments market is likely to be worth $74.03 billion in 2020, growing at a 16.7 per cent CAGR to hit the $137.46 billion-mark by 2024, as per Statista. Digital payments’ largest segment is digital commerce with a projected total transaction value of $57.57 billion in 2020.
