Paytm mulls revenue, monetisation methods to expand in upcoming quarters

Digital payments behemoth Paytm may increase revenue and monetisation methods on its platforms in the upcoming quarters. Paytm chairman and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said during an earnings call that due to the COVID-19 impact, the company is seeing scale in system deployment and non-UPI revenue, where merchant pays revenue charges, merchants discount rate (MDR) for payments and credit led financial service, and provides the company with next level of monetisation.   “We believe, we in the next few quarters will be able to not just expand revenue but increase more number of monetisation methods and subsequently increase contribution margins in due course. Our team, myself and everyone is super energised seeing the opportunity in front of us and we are committed to executing and delivering great results forward quarters,” Sharma noted.   Paytm CFO and President Madhur Deora stated that the company aims to bring half a billion Indians to the mainstream economy through technology-led financial services.   “You may have noticed some recently announced bank partnerships for point of sales (PoS). There is an announcement with HDFC Bank and there are also partnerships with other banks. This is giving us very strong momentum in the large format retailer market, the large format retail market in the offline market world,” he said.  Paytm executives also highlighted that they are seeing “recovery of high-margin commerce business, and growth of cloud business” and increase in financial services revenue driven by rise in lending activities.   The digital payments behemoth has also claimed that large merchants of competitors are switching to its platform and it will now see a big opportunity in capturing the mid-level market and startup community with its payment products. Platforms like Domino’s, Myntra and Oyo among others partnered with Paytm for utilising its ‘Paytm Token Gateway’ service to carry out transactions without saving actual details of debit and credit cards.   Meanwhile, One 97 Communications, Paytm’s parent company reported consolidated loss of Rs 481.70 crore in Q2FY21 and a rise in total income by 19.62 per cent to Rs 1,134.50 crore in the same period.  (With agency inputs)