 "Founder and CEO of Paytm, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, interacts with media during the press conference in New Delhi on Wednesday (Photo: Dalip Kumar)")
“What are you paranoid about in this huge window of opportunity that has suddenly opened for you?” I asked Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO of Paytm, in an interview a couple of days ago in Delhi. This was right after he had launched a new feature in the Paytm app to solve the problem of card payments in India.
“I’m paranoid about tech scale, process scale, people scale… While we’re growing this, we shouldn’t be spread too thin,” Vijay said in reply to my question.
Mobile POS put on hold
On Thursday evening, Paytm had to put on hold its new feature enabling mom-and-pop stores as well as all service providers – from the repairs man to the housemaid – to accept card payments without the need for card-swiping machines. We will re-launch this product as soon as we have updated the product,” Paytm said in a blog post.
Paytm vs card companies
What is clear, however, is the need for innovative payments solutions to mitigate the cash crunch in the country and support the government’s push towards a digital economy. One of the unsolved problems is the low level of card payment acceptance offline. There are 740 million credit and debit cards in the country, but only 1.5 million card-swiping machines.
Wheels within wheels
A more subtle angle is that cards become superfluous once Paytm becomes ubiquitous – it’s more convenient to use a wallet when the cap on how much money it can store is raised.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here
