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Q. How is the overall offline market size in eastern India and PAN India?

A. It is difficult to evaluate the overall market size owing to the lack of comprehensive data on the number of small and unstructured retailers in a particular region. However, our offline market size is growing at over 100% on year-on-year basis across India.

In the offline space, the average size of transaction is about Rs 500. With UPI cards coming in the Paytm platform, a lot of large ticket transactions have started. This will definitely push the ticket size up. The wallet service provider recorded about 10 million transactions a day which included both online and offline transactions and of which about 60% was from the offline space.

Q. How are you planning to enhance the QR-based payment solution? What are your plans?

A. We are driving aggressive innovation in payments by enhancing our QR. We recently included the capability to scan any non-Paytm QR codes generated using open standards. We also have regular offers to promote the habit of QR scanning in our country. We have invested a lot to build a field force of 10,000 people who are reaching out to merchants in various cities to make sure that the merchants get training. We will invest around Rs 500 crore in 2018 to conduct merchant training and awareness initiatives to scale operations across India.

Q. Please tell us about the company’s plans for eastern India?

A. Eastern India is one of our most important markets and we are aggressively expanding our reach in the region. We will deploy more than 2,500 sales personnel to build the Paytm ecosystem across eastern India. We are also looking to acquire more ATL space for customer and merchant education.

Q. How will the new QR-based payment solution benefit merchants?

A. The merchants receive payments directly into their bank accounts without any additional charges. They do not need to submit any form or document. Also, there will be no monthly limit on receiving payments.

Q. What is the new payment use cases added to Paytm?

A. We have recently added several new offline payment use cases to Paytm including entertainment parks, street hawkers, railway stations, stores at bus stands and electric auto rickshaws to name a few.

Q. Many retailers like Amazon and Flipkart as well as banks have opened their own mobile wallets to encourage clients to use their mobile payment systems. In such a situation, how is Paytm maintaining its relevance?

A. Paytm is no longer just a mobile wallet but a truly open payment platform. We believe our consumers and merchants should have the complete range of choices to select payment sources and destinations while making payments using our platform. Moreover, our large merchant base and ever increasing customer base keeps us relevant and helps us to maintain our advantage in the offline payments sector.