Paytm Japan claims 10 Mn users, 100 Mn transactions in 10 months

After having made initial headway in the domestic payment market, digital payments major Paytm has claimed to register significant growth in Japan in the last ten months.

Paytm's Japan payment business PayPay in the period has acquired 10 million users, with 100 million transactions, said Paytm's founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma in a tweet.

This means Paytm Japan now has over 8% of Japan total population on its platform.

Interestingly, last month the company had shared 6 months growth figure of PayPay where it claimed to have garnered about 8 million customers during the period on its platform. 

PayPay will continue to provide convenient smartphone payments to all retail shops, service providers and users, to promote cashless payment in the country, said the company in a statement. It further claimed to have acquired around 1 million merchants on its platform.

In July last year, the Noida-based firm had announced to launch its payments services in Japan, which is also the home of one of its investors SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son.

Son has also been actively helping Paytm expand its payment operation in Japan. The country is Paytm’s second offshore market after Canada. 

Digital Payment firm has also tied up with PayPay corporation to offer QR code-based payment solutions.  

Similar to India, Japan is also at the initial stage of being a digital-led economy, where digital transactions are still less than 30% of total transactions.

With more than 350 million customers and 5.5 billion transactions in India, Sharma-led firm aims to replicate a similar journey in the land of the rising sun.

At present, instant-messaging platform Line Corp and e-commerce platform Mercari Inc are the two platforms, who are offering the digital payment service in Japan. Though they do not have any international exposure.

In the absence of major payment players like Alibaba and WeChat in Japan, Paytm sees a huge opportunity in the market. 

Paytm is also planning to offer P2P transactions before Olympics 2020 in Tokyo.

Paytm Japan's number comes as the firm is witnessing a downfall in UPI market share. The Alibaba-backed digital payment firm has registered only 133 million transactions and contributed 16% to overall 822 million transactions across UPI-enabled platforms in July 2019.

Meanwhile, its rivals Google Pay and Phone Pe have surged ahead in market share with over 35% contribution in UPI transaction volume.