The rapid digitisation of business processes is offering large, new-age fintech players an unprecedented opportunity to tap into India’s millions of unorganised merchants, and homegrown fintech major PayTM plans to do exactly that.
The company has, over the past few months, rolled out a series of business tools integrated into its PayTM for Business mobile application, from a digital ledger system called PayTM Business Khata to an all-in-one QR code system for its merchant partners.
“There is a large unorganised segment which lags behind when it comes to the adoption of digital solutions,” pointed out Sajal Bhatnagar, Merchant Product and Lifecycle Lead at PayTM. But, these small scale merchants are now accumulating a veritable plethora of digital payment solutions, all of which have to be tracked and managed.
The new set of solutions PayTM has launched integrates these into a single touchpoint from where merchants can track pending and outstanding payments, send reminders to customers to settle dues and access other business services.
“The idea was how we could use digital solutions to unify and make these solutions easier to use. We did it with the all-in-one QR code which unified UPI, wallets and PoS (point of sale) payments channels… Now, with the PayTM Business Khata in the PayTM for Business app, it eliminates the ledger from counters, resulting in lesser errors and leakages,” Bhatnagar pointed out.
Small merchants typically have a much longer period of outstanding dues since collection is a manpower intensive process. "The outstanding dues of these merchants stay unpaid for as long as 80-180 days compared to around 30-60 days for organised merchants. This is because records are ad-hoc and the effort required to collect is high. That is why we have incorporated a system where reminders can be sent to the customer who can settle them remotely," Bhatnagar said. The offering has seen over a million merchants get onboard in just two months of launch.
Going forward, the company says it will launch several more business-facing solutions. “We are developing several other services like this for our partners and will launch them over the coming months. They can already avail several business services like loans, inventory management and other financial services through the PayTM for Business app,” he said.