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    There are 3 million absolutely new users in last four to five days: Deepak Abbot of payTM

    Synopsis

    "In total we have got 150 million users and generally in a month we see about 25 to 30 million active users on our Android app and another 15 million on our website."

    ET Now
    In a chat with ET Now, Deepak Abbot, Sr VP, PayTM says that in last five days alone PayTm has seen close to 16 million people actually transacting on PayTM and doing some offline transaction so that is again close to 600 to 700% increase there.

    ET Now: Firstly let us get some numbers in out here compared to the number of users that you already had, what is the increase in number of users or number of downloads that happen ever since PM Modi announce this move?

    Deepak Abbot:
    So basically starting from 8th night after I think about 10 o’clock when we started seeing that surge we already seen close to 3 million people who downloaded our app. These are 3 million absolutely new users in last four to five days and that is like generally in five days we would do half a million so you can already see that it is 600% growth there and in terms of number of transactions I think since lot of existing users were either using PayTM regularly or some users who had PayTM earlier on their app but were not a regular users they also came in large numbers so just to give you some numbers there in last five days alone we have seen close to 16 million people actually transacting on PayTM and doing some offline transaction so that is again close to 600 to 700% increase there.

    ET Now: What is the number of users that you have in toto?

    Deepak Abbot:
    In total we have got 150 million users and generally in a month we see about 25 to 30 million active users on our Android app and another 15 million on our website and we have seen that traffic coming in last four days alone.

    ET Now: I do not know whether you can dissect it when the numbers have just suddenly jumped up in this way but are these transactions to your mind happening for essential items or is it happening discretionary spend what I am just trying to gather is that are people jeopardised for essential items and therefore they are resorting to PayTM in order to do this I mean is there a bifurcation that you have like that?

    Deepak Abbot:
    Yes, we have that so, for example we have close to 200,000 very very small time hawkers who actually use PayTM as a payment service and they are classified under P to P so they actually technically are accepting very very small payments of about Rs 30 to Rs 50 and we have seen like crazy increase there about 1000% increase in small denomination. So definitely your day to day roadside may be eateries or a chaiwala or a paanwala those kind of things have really scaled up and plus we have seen grocery shopping really really going up. So all are partners, all are merchants who are basically grocery stores or departmental stores there we have seen transactions going up significantly so obviously daily needs and as well as your very very small ticket items because people do not have change and they do not want to use change so they preferred using PayTM instead.

    Plus we have seen some interesting numbers even though government has allowed chemist to accept Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes but we see that medicines are at number four so that means when they used to be like may be number 10 for us in the overall categories but I think again because of small value transaction may be Rs 100 to Rs 200 people are still not spending cash because chemist are refusing to give Rs 100 back even though they are accepting Rs 500 but let us say someone has to buy for Rs 200 they prefer using PayTM instead.

    ET Now: There would be certain accounts which would be accepting accounts, for example I know of a local milk vendor who has installed a PayTM account three days ago because he realised that he needs this so that customers can pay him, the number of money accepting accounts, do you have a bifurcation like that based on trends or spending or accepting otherwise and has that gone up?

    Deepak Abbot:
    So as of today we have about 850000 merchants registered but just in last five days we had 4000 people on the street,that feet was going out signing up merchants and we are now signing close to 25000 merchants every day so in just in the last four to five days we have a 110000 merchants added, now that is like we used add about 100000 in a month’s time because of the scale of this country and various smaller districts but we have just scaled up our operations and we have got a lot of feet on street. So just in the last five days 100000 active merchants who have just come on board, out of that interestingly 60000 people actually came on their own so they used our DIY service, they could just come into our website, create their wallet account and start accepting payments so technically for us these are merchants who have just come on board and they are actually generating more volume for us than our other 850000 merchants because they came in and they are actually customers to use PayTM instead of using cash.
    The Economic Times

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