Paytm expects to add 5,00,000 offline merchants in November

India's largest digital wallet player Paytm expects to onboard 5,00,000 merchants on its platform in November to accept offline payments as the country grapples with a shortage of cash due to the Modi government's move to scrap large currency bills last week.

As the company sees a surge in usage of its digital wallet service with customers who had signed up and stopped using the service coming back, small merchants too are eyeing Paytm as a way to rope in business. Paytm claims its user base has now reached 155 million users and growing at nearly half a million users a day.

"Last month we were introducing about 5,000 merchants a day and in the first ten days of this month, before Prime Minister Modi made the announcement, we were up to about 10,000 new merchants a day. After the announcement, that number has gone up to 20,000 merchants a day," said Madhur Deora, CFO at Paytm, at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Bengaluru on Wednesday.

Paytm began onboarding offline merchants on its platform around six months ago and says it had scaled the division enough to enable signing up such a large number of merchants today. To put that into perspective, India has only about 600,000 merchants that accept payments through credit/debit cards.

Building on its base of 150,000 merchants at the end of October, Paytm could be accepted at more points than credit and debit cards by December. Moreover, with a base of 40 million small and medium businesses in the country, the base for growth continues to remain huge.