Mobile wallets have started to make their presence felt in the offline payments world as well – paying a cab driver (remember Paytm TV commercial?) or buying grocery through your mobile wallet does not raise eyebrows anymore…it is becoming commonplace. While this is currently the case in urban areas, mobile wallets are making their way to rural areas as well.
Now, Paytm has introduced Mobile Wallet Top-ups through ATMs, which will enable users to top-up their Paytm mobile wallets for making offline or online purchases. The process is exactly the same how you would remove cash from an ATM machine – but instead of cash, here the user just top-ups his mobile wallet.
To enable this, Paytm has forged a partnership with Bank of Maharashtra. This partnership will help the Bank’s customers having debit cards to top up their Paytm Wallet through any of the Bank’s 1800 ATMs. The initiative will be rolled out across the country over the next few days.
Nitin Misra, Vice President, Paytm said, “We are excited at rolling out the feature of topping up the Paytm Wallet through bank ATMs. This first of its kind wallet top up feature through the Bank ATMs is bound to make transactions easier and more accessible to everyone and we see this as a significant step towards powering cash free transactions.”
Paytm has launched number of initiatives in last 3-6 months that shows their thrust on offline cashless payments. Earlier in the year, Paytm had also announced setting up of nearly 50,000 offline retail shops to help people recharge their digital wallet and also provide basic customer care.
The Future of Cashless Offline Payments
We have said this earlier – Digital Wallets are on their way to replace Physical wallets.
Acceptance of digital payments in offline world has very many advantages to buyers as well as merchants – There is no need to handle or have physical cash. All payments can be done through mobile. Buyers don’t have to worry about carrying change with them which is a constant issue. Also, with digital payments, buyers and merchants can easily track and account for all of their transactions.
From Merchant’s perspective, it opens up a whole new world of Digital payments. Anyone from an Handyman to a Rickshaw driver to a Kirana store can start accepting Digital payments with ease and simplicity.
Mobikwik, another leading Indian mobile wallet company recently announced that they were able to garner 5 lakh offline cashless transactions on their wallet worth Rs. 60 Cr in less than three months. This clearly shows that consumers are now increasingly using mobile wallets as their preferred cashless payment method!
While we are just getting started with Digital payments revolution, we foresee that digital payments will dominate and overtake cash transactions a few years from now!
What do you think?
