Bengaluru: Online payment company Paytm on Monday said that its in-app chat feature, Paytm Inbox, has crossed 120 million monthly active users (MAUs). The company also said that it will focus more on regional content for making it more popular across small cities and towns.
Paytm Inbox went live last November on the Android platform. The latest update includes in-app live TV, news, cricket, entertainment videos and mobile games. The company said that it has partnered with multiple content providers for the new additions to Inbox.
The feature also offers direct payments throught chat. The addition of gaming and entertainment feature was borrowed from Facebook’s Messenger app, and other platforms like China’s WeChat, which was the pioneer in social payments in the Chinese market.
Industry experts believe that social payments are the next step in digital payments since it provides the functionality of chat and mobile payments on the same platform. Mobile internet companies, globally, have been trying to make person-to-person payments faster and easier. Integrating payments over chat has been a trend, ever since Facebook’s Messenger app first tested payments via chatbots in late 2016.
Social payments in India is largely done through mobile wallets, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and net banking. Besides Paytm, Tencent- and Foxconn-backed Hike Messenger, which claims 100 million users in India, has also introduced payments on its messaging platform in January. While, Facebook-owned WhatsApp has also started testing payments via UPI from early this year, the feature is yet to be fully rolled out in India.
However, the social payments battle is likely to be fought between WhatsApp and Paytm in India, since both platforms claim over 200 million users, each.
Last week, Stockholm-based Truecaller had acquired Mumbai-based mobile payments start-up Chillr for an undisclosed amount, marking its entry into the mobile payments space. Truecaller claims to have 150 million registered users in India.
“We are really honoured to be part of the everyday routine of our users. We will now be offering various content from news to live TV to entertainment videos and games to further strengthen our relationship with the customers. Paytm has fast emerged as a super app for India and we will continue to add more offerings to our portfolio, giving our customers one more reason to use Paytm every day,” said Deepak Abbot, senior vice-president, Paytm, in a statement.
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