Paytm has now started offering Income Tax Returns on their portal. The service seems to have gone live couple of days back.
Paytm has launched the service in partnership with cleartax.in, one of the providers of online filing of tax returns in India. It looks Paytm seems to have launched this take advantage of the tax filing season that we are currently in. Apart from the link and a text box where you enter your email ID, nothing else happens on Paytm portal itself.
Once a user enters the email id, they are transferred to Cleartax portal to complete further process.
The good part however for the users is currently Paytm is offering e-filing of tax returns completely free of cost if it is done through them (It is free even if you do it directly through cleartax.in as well).
This is an interesting launch from Paytm, and also quite different from their other services. Incase of services like Mobile recharge, data card recharge or utility bill payments, the user completes the entire transaction on Paytm site itself. The same is the case for recently launched online Bus Ticketing services.
However, incase of Income Tax returns, they are merely acting as a lead generator for Cleartax. While it is a good move as they are able to leverage their existing customers, it does showcase the thinking of people behind Paytm. They want Paytm to be an umbrella for all online services that Indians may need. For services which they cannot built in-house, they will probably have external tie-ups like the one with cleartax.
From Cleartax perspective, this seems to be a great tie-up because they are now exposed to large pool of Paytm audience.
What do you think about this Paytm service? Should they launch more services like these, where they merely act as lead generators?
