Paytm to dole out incentives for merchants at kirana stores

In a move to make deeper inroads in the country, digital payments company Paytm on Thursday announced to push cashback from peer-to-peer UPI transactions to offline merchant payments at retail kirana stores.

The company is aiming to partner with almost 20 million retail kirana stores, enabling them to accept all digital payment modes including UPI, wallet and cards.

“Paytm will invest money in offline merchant expansion instead of driving incentive led P2P transactions. Our offline merchants create high-frequency usage and an important use-case for Paytm consumers,” said Deepak Abbot, Senior Vice President, Paytm.

UPI P2P payments are mostly done by users to receive‍ some extra money. On Paytm, the UPI users are already the ones who have been using a large host of Paytm services for a long time and don’t nerd cashbacks to make payments.

“To further help merchants get better access to capital and provide more financial security Paytm will invest on lending and insurance, rather than on P2P payments,” the company said in a statement.

Through its payment ecosystem, Paytm has already created a network effect with over 5 billion transactions in 2018-19.

It also claims to have 12 million merchant partners accepting payments through Paytm QR, which accepts all digital payment instruments like UPI, wallets, cards and netbanking.