Just recently, Paytm—pretty much the biggest mobile payments tool in India—managed to land quite an achievement. It became the first mobile payments app in India to reach the 100 million downloads mark on the Google Play Store. It’s an industry first, actually, as no single app had ever reached that point in downloads to date.
The crucial ninth figure had been reached sometime in the second week of December, reports from the company noted, and came as Paytm had been actively working on plans to branch out from mobile payments. The company has been looking to become a more complete mobile-first financial services operation, offering not only payments functions, but also banking, insurance and lending options as well. Users can even buy movie tickets or book travel passes, among other opportunities.
Deepak Abbot, Paytm’s senior vice president, commented “We are overwhelmed with the 100 million downloads mark, reaching this milestone is a testimony to the efforts of the incredible team at Paytm. This achievement will offer us a strong boost as we work towards our goal of making India a digital-first economy.”
Paytm’s success owes to several factors; easily one of the largest is its sheer variety of services offered. That kind of variety likely makes it very appealing to potential users, and thus, a welcome addition to most Indians’ mobile operations. Its ease of acquisition and use is also another likely factor, though Paytm in general likely owes much of its success to the Indian government’s move to ban large quantities of currency from the country itself. The demonetization of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes may well have been the making of Paytm, at least on some level.
No matter what factor you chalk it up to, in the end, Paytm is a very big deal in India, which makes it a pretty big deal worldwide thanks to the sheer size of its user base. Where it goes from here, meanwhile, should be well worth watching.