Paytm payment gateway registers 750m monthly transactions, surpasses pre-Covid level, says company

Paytm continued to remain the distant third player in UPI transactions in February 2021.

Paytm on Monday announced that its payment gateway is the largest processor of business payments with over 750 million monthly transactions now. Adoption of online payments for sectors such as BFSI, retail and direct-to-consumer (D2C) e-commerce, utilities, edtech, food delivery, digital entertainment, gaming and online shift of businesses during and post covid times had enabled growth for the payment gateway even as its transaction volume had long surpassed pre-covid levels, the company said in a statement.

Adoption of payment instruments issued by Paytm Payments Bank, including Paytm Wallet and Paytm UPI contributed about 60 per cent to the total transactions registered on the gateway. Also, Paytm PostPaid and EMI services which were launched last year registered 25 per cent month-on-month growth, Paytm said. “Our systems have the capacity to manage up to 2,500 transactions per second which ensure stability when our enterprise merchants see spikes during special events and sales,” said Praveen Sharma, Sr. Vice President, Paytm.

According to RedSeer’s August 2020 report on digital payments in India, Paytm is the largest player in the merchant payments space with a 50 per cent market share followed by Phonepe and Google Pay. However, as per the monthly UPI transaction data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Walmart’s payment arm in India PhonePe continued to remain the dominant UPI app for a third straight month in February 2021, cornering an impressive 42.5 per cent share of the 2,292.90 million UPI transactions.

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Paytm remained the distant third player in February as well recording 340.71 million transactions involving Rs 38,493.52 crore. It had processed 332.69 million transactions worth Rs 37,845.76 crore in the preceding month. Google Pay, which had lost the top spot to PhonePe in December 2020, had retained the second-largest UPI app in February processing 827.86 million transactions worth Rs 1.74 lakh crore.

India’s digital payments are likely to grow at a CAGR of 27 per cent during the FY20-25 period. The digital transactions are expected to jump from Rs 2,153 lakh crore in FY20 to Rs 7,092 lakh crore in FY25, according to the India Trend Book Report 2021 launched last week by the Indian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (IVCA) and Ernst & Young. The payment gateway aggregator market is expected to grow at around 19 per cent CAGR from Rs 9.5 lakh crore in FY20 to Rs 22.6 lakh crore in FY25 while the merchant payments segment is likely to see 52 per cent growth from Rs 4.7 lakh crore to Rs 33 lakh crore during the said period.