India’s online payments and e-commerce giant Paytm has recently introduced a new feature that’s definitely going to make our lives easier. Under the new feature, Paytm users now will be able to automate their recurring bills and payments for various digital services such as O.T.T subscriptions, loan repayments, various membership fees and several others.
This new feature of recurring payments using the Paytm wallet will come with a limit of up to Rs. 2,000. As of now, Paytm enables recurring payments via bank cards and bank accounts using NPCI’s e-mandate solution. They also plan to enable the same using UPI in coming months.
Paytm has released a press release in which they explained how the whole feature works. Users will need to provide a one-time approval or consent at the time of creating a subscription for a particular bill or payment wherein they will be asked several key pieces of information such as the name of the merchant, amount to be paid, the frequency of the payments and the beginning date of the subscription date. No other information or additional steps are required beyond this.
Senior Vice President of Paytm, Puneet Jain has remarked that the demand for such subscription-based payments in India is being created by the rapid adoption of O.T.Ts and the digitisation of various utility bills. He further went on to say that Paytm is expecting a 10x growth in this particular segment whilst hoping to process recurring payments worth hundreds of crores.
It took a while for the subscription model to gain a foothold in India but the success of brands like Amazon Prime and Hotstar has proven that there is a massive market for subscription businesses in the country. With the internet, online commerce and digital payments, the subscription business model in India is now moving online. The earliest player to leverage online subscriptions in India were media and publication businesses. Now digital payment apps such as Paytm can leverage this to their advantage by offering uniquely tailored payment solutions such as the one they recently launched for the same.
Paytm in 2020?
Paytm is surely making huge strides in the fintech industry by keeping up with consumer expectations and launching in-demand payment features and solutions at a rapid pace. At the beginning of this year in January Paytm became the largest issuer of FastTags by issuing 3 million of them via their Payments Bank. Earlier in this month, they also launched an ‘all in one POS device’ which further goes on to strengthen their market share. The online payments and e-commerce giant is reportedly also looking to foray into the content space with their own OTT service.
Recently Team Dazeinfo had an opportunity to interview the Chief Executive Officer of Paytm, Vijay Shekhar, wherein he pointed out the average size of transactions of customers to merchants is around Rs 500. People are paying Rs 2000, Rs 5000 or Rs 200, Rs 300 on the lower side which is only set to increase further with this newly launched feature of Paytm.
