Jio, Uber, Zomato, Oyo, others drive Paytm’s growth; Vijay Shekhar’s firm rules half market

Vijay Shekhar Sharma founded Paytm now dominates online transactions with it having half of the share of the market among rival gateways. Driving its growth are leading brands which include Reliance Jio, Uber, Zomato, OYO, Dominoes and IRCTC, and others, as the majority of the digital transactions are done for these brands, Paytm said in a statement. Also, Paytm Payments Gateway (PG) has seen a three-fold jump in the number of transactions in the last year.

Also, transactions for other brands such as Grofers, Big Basket, PVR, and Club Factory have also contributed to Paytm’s growth. The company continues to witness growth in transactions through the Paytm Payment Gateway across fast-growing categories such as transportation, food delivery, gaming as well as existing large verticals of travel and telecom, said Kiran Vasireddy, Chief Operating Officer, Paytm.

Processing over 400 million transactions every month, Paytm has become stiff competition for other players including Freecharge, Mobikwik etc. “Paytm PG is significantly ahead of the competition with the largest volume and the largest merchant base,” the One97 owned company said. Compared to the next big player, Paytm does fivefold more transactions.

Previously, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant had said that the government’s role in enabling Fintech has benefited Fintech startups. The collaboration of government with the industry has also built Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which is used not just for BHIM, but private players such as Paytm, GPay, Mobiwkik, PhonePe and Whatsapp also leverage the UPI tech.

Recently, Paytm had unearthed an internal fraud of Rs 10 crore as its junior employees were found colluding with small merchants. The Paytm founder said that after Diwali, they realised that some small sellers were getting a large percentage of cashback. After EY conducted a deeper audit, it was found that the company’s own employees were guilty in helping the merchants Paytm sacked its employees after the discovery.

The NCR based Paytm is backed by Softbank, SAIF Partners, Alibaba Group and Ant Financial.

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