PayMate says has achieved annualised run-rate of $1.3 bn in GST payments

The firm's payment automation platform processed over $130 million GST payments monthly in 2020.

Fintech firm PayMate has achieved an annualized run-rate of $1.3 billion in goods and services tax (GST) payments through its business-to-business payments platform, said the company.

The company’s full-stack payment automation platform has processed over $130 million GST payments monthly in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic year, through bank-issued Visa commercial cards. These transactions are projected to grow over $250 million being processed every month in the upcoming fiscal year ending March 2022.

“Usually, statutory payments such as GST and Direct Taxes are paid using EFT (electronic funds transfer),” said Ajay Adiseshann, founder and chief executive officer of PayMate. “However, the exceptional capability of enabling businesses to use commercial cards for these payments has proved to be extremely fruitful as we are providing additional avenues to businesses for using their commercial credit cards on our platform. And we are sure that this will attract more small, medium, and large businesses to adopt PayMate.”

PayMate competes with Razorpay, Pine Labs, Paytm and BharatPe in the business-to-business payments space. About annualised transactions, the firm said it is targetting to achieve a run rate of $10-15 billion on gross processing volumes by March 2022.

PayMate’s GST payment automation service allows businesses to make bulk payments for challans generated on the GST portal across multiple GSTINs (goods and services taxpayer identification number). The challans are fetched on the PayMate platform in a single step, followed by a digital approval process on the platform. This eliminates manual effort and saves considerable time. 

During the pandemic, over 80 per cent of businesses have faced difficulty in managing their cashflows, as they were delayed and unpredictable. This in turn made it difficult for them to make their statutory payments such as GST on time. In such a scenario, the availability of funds on credit via a commercial card proved to be a boon. 

Additionally, by end of March 2021; businesses will be able to make their direct tax payments such as TDS, advance tax, self-assessment tax among others on the PayMate platform. To do so, businesses have to select the challans, enter the amount to be paid and proceed to pay in bulk or Adhoc. Moreover, large enterprises can choose to make all their direct tax payments using a single login for their subsidiary companies instead of multiple logins.

Tax payments can also be made along with other supplier payables in bulk using commercial credit cards. This gives a single-window with automated payment and reconciliation, detailed reports, and clear visibility into cash-flows. The company said using the PayMate platform to the best of its abilities eliminates the need for using multiple software tools and traditional book-keeping records. This makes businesses more efficient, and gain greater control and transparency over their finances.

Large companies like Marico and Redington India use PayMate for GST payments. “It has been a seamless experience for our team to execute nationwide GST transactions in a hassle-free and timely manner,” said Pawan Agrawal, CFO, Marico Limited.

Varun Varada, treasury head at Redington India, said PayMate has eased up the process of GST approvals and payment for all REDIL branches located across India (28 states) by integrating their portal with the GST website. “With a single click, we were able to approve all the GST payments of 28 states,” said Varada.