You may soon use Paytm to pay at milk booth, small grocery stores

Alipay and Paytm are tapping the Indian offline merchants to increase transactions on Paytm’s digital wallet.

For this, the Chinese payments company Alipay will be helping its Indian partner Paytm with technology.

"We are trying to get them to transact digitally, from paying at the milk booth, to booking cabs and movie tickets and paying for utilities," Kiran Vasireddy, senior vice president-payments at Paytm, told ET.

Paytm presently gets 10 per cent transactions from offline merchants and wants to more than triple it to 50 per cent by the end of 2017.

"India is different from China, cash plays a dominant role in daily transactions and the lack of payment options gives Paytm...the opportunity (to offer) convenient, fast and secure payment solution to brick-and-mortar merchants, as well as other O2O payment scenarios," Zhiming Fan, president of payment business unit at Ant Financial, told ET.

When compared to China, where 30 per cent people use cash, 95 per cent Indians use cash for transactions.

In China too Alipay gets about 10% transactions from offline merchants.