Paytm claims 100M mobile wallet users with 75M daily transactions

Mobile commerce and virtual wallet property Paytm now has over 100 million users in the country for its mobile wallet, said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO.

Paytm, which is run by Noida-headquartered mobile internet firm One97 Communications Ltd, reached this milestone less than four months after it hit the 50 million user mark in April.

Around 75 million transactions are carried out every month on Paytm Wallet, Sharma added. Its mobile wallet is accepted by over 80,000 merchants across the country. Paytm targets to work with 10 million merchants by next year.

Paytm's closest competitor MobiKwik has 17 million users on the wallet side. It works with about 50,000 merchants.

Paytm had started by offering mobile recharge and utility bill payments to customers before adding a full marketplace on its mobile platform.

In July, the company launched its P2P (person-to-person) money transfer service, which enables users to quickly transfer funds to other Paytm users.

The company did a soft launch for this in April this year with select users before rolling it out to other customers.

In February, Ant Financial Services Group, an affiliate of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, had said it is acquiring 25 per cent stake in One97. The financials of the deal were not disclosed.

In March, Ratan Tata, former chief of Tata Group and currently chairman emeritus of group's holding company Tata Sons,also put money in Paytm.

Recently, One97 acquired the title sponsorship rights for India's domestic and international cricket matches at home for a period of four years with a bid price of Rs 203.28 crore.