Paytm is already India’s leading wallet with over 15 crore users. It’s been rapidly pushing its wallet to small merchants and consumers, encouraging them to use it for transactions. But now it’s pulled out its biggest trump card yet.
Paytm has announced that its app will immediately be able to accept debit and credit cards for merchants. This makes the Paytm app doubly useful for a small business owner to have – not only can it accept wallet payments, it can also accept payments made by customers through cards. In doing so, Paytm has managed to cover yet another touchpoint in the digital transactions space.
Retweeted Deepak Abbot (@deepakabbot):
India's first App POS @Paytm pic.twitter.com/VVwly1h4Wl https://t.co/nS1MGI6mBl
— Pankaj Bhole (@pb_jal) November 23, 2016
Paytm’s app will function as a digital POS, or point of sale. Merchants can go to www.paytm.com/business, and declare themselves as a business. After entering their bank details, they can begin accepting bank cards, without the need to buy an expensive card machine.
And Paytm is incentivizing merchants who use the app – the company has announced a 0% fee on debit cards till 31st December.
All digital wallet firms have been scrambling to come up with products and marketing ideas in the wake of the government’s decision to ban Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 currency notes. Paytm has been especially innovative over the last 2 weeks – it had earlier carried out a newspaper ad that doubled up as a “Paytm accepted here” sign for merchants, and now it’s effectively made card machines obsolete. By replacing clunky card machines with its app, Paytm has made another giant stride in the payments space – and possibly further strengthened its position as India’s foremost digital payments solution.