E-commerce and digital payments giant PayTM is all set to expand aggressively into yet another sector: Education. While the company already offers a number of services in the space, it is planning to expand this bouquet of services over the next few quarters. Speaking to this publication, PayTM’s senior vice president Vineet Kaul said that the primary trigger for the company’s decision to expand its offerings in the sector was the sheer size of the market (India has between 200-300 million students) and the absence of a ‘one-stop-shop’ for all education services.
“This is a large space and it cannot be ignored. While there are many players in the space who offer many different niche education services, there isn’t anywhere parents and students can go to access all of them,” Kaul pointed out. According to the company’s official statement, PayTM will embark on the expansion by “partnering with private and government institutions to offer a full bouquet of services across payments, commerce, financial and academic services”.
According to Kaul, the company already has several thousand partners, including school, colleges and coaching centres. “We want to enable the student and parent community at every step. Right from providing details on 25,000 colleges, schools, courses and exams, our bouquet of services will include – payments (in-app and in educational centres), commerce (coaching, scholarships, test preparation, admission forms, etc.) and financial services (student insurance, educational loans (easy EMI) and banking),” Kaul said.
While the company will partner with other entities to provide services like test preparation coaching for a wide variety of tests, there will also be products it will build in-house. One major such effort is a system that will allow parents and students to apply easily to a number of schools and colleges in one go.
“All they will need to do is fill in a single application form on the app and they can then send it to multiple schools or colleges they plan to apply for. This will make an extremely cumbersome process easy,” Kaul said. With several products and services to be rolled out over the next few months, PayTM aims to cross Rs 20,000 crore in Gross Merchandise Value by the end of this financial year in the education segment.