More than 50% of Paytm's offline merchants accept UPI payments

Digital payments major Paytm's popularity is not unknown be it metros, small town or even in villages. Besides dominating the online mode of payments, the Alibaba-backed company has been expanding its offline presence through small shops, organised retails and merchants.

Driven by a huge user base of around nine million offline merchants on its platform, Paytm has claimed that more than 5 million of them accepts UPI as the mode of payments. Besides transforming its offline merchants through UPI adoption, Paytm also counts over 40 per cent of the total transaction on its platform happened via those merchants.

As far as UPI transaction in big cities is concerned, Bengaluru and Hyderabad lead the show followed by Delhi, Pune, and Mumbai respectively.

According to Deepak Abbot, senior vice president at Paytm, the company wants to take UPI adoption to the grassroots of the country by educating and introducing more consumers and merchants, reports ET.

In offline merchants base, Paytm finds only Flipkart-backed PhonePe as its major competitor. The Sameer Nigam-led firm has also been targeting offline merchants since its inception.

With 100 million overall users, PhonePe claims about 3,00,000 merchants on its platform. PhonePe offline merchant base is not as big as Paytm, however, the former has managed to cross 2 million offline transactions in last month and expected to increase it to 10 million by December.

In UPI transaction via offline merchants, PhonePe claimed over 70 per cent marketshare comes via these channels.

Like Paytm, PhonePe has also penetrated the offline market by partnering with major national chains across all retail categories including Mother Dairy, Spencer’s, Apollo Pharmacy, Medplus, McDonald’s, and now it is rolling out its payment solutions across IOCL and HPCL outlets.

Further, PhonePe is also planning to deploy around 50,000 PoS device to bring more offline merchants on its platform.