Paytm to turn credit rating agency. Here’s why

Delhi based mobile commerce company, Paytm is exploring new horizons ever since it sold its 25% stake to China’s Alibaba. While offering seamless recharge and bill payment services on their mobile based platform with tons of other facilities including buying of products, it is now adding to its portfolio - a credit rating agency based on customer transaction data on its digital wallet.

Based on its promise of ‘Handcrafted in India’, Paytm will bring Alibaba's mobile payment platform , Alipay's credit rating service called Sesame Credit to India with a bit of localisation, the Economic Times has reported. It will use a system based on online and offline data to generate individual credit scores for consumers and merchants using Paytm platform.

"We are on our roadmap to touch 100 million customer by end of this year," its founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma told ET. "This large customer base will help us create newer business models in a way no one ever imagined." Explaining how the platform will work, Sharma said, "Based on the transactions on our platform and big data technologies, we can tell what the customer's monthly income is.”

“We will sign up with affiliates to provide these customers with cash advances, personal or education loans,” he added. If you’re tired of entering your Debit Card or net banking PINs every time you access the mobile platform of Paytm, it is also working with Alipay on a technology that'll use face recognition to authenticate payments.

In an aggressive bid to widen its business, Paytm is working with Mumbai Metro, fast food chain Faasos and Cafe Coffee Day to allow customers to pay at the physical location with Paytm wallet.

"Wallet customer in China does so many more transactions in a day that we are going to bring those technologies to India. For example, in a store, instead of paying through cash or card, you'll be able to show the shopkeeper a QR code on your mobile, he'll scan the code and the payment will be done in a single click," Sharma explained.

The company already does over 32 million transactions a month through its 27 million wallet customers and more than Rs 60 crore is being added to Paytm wallets, Sharma said.

(Image: India Times)