Paytm shakes hands with Uber and Alipay for payments across 400 cities worldwide

By Harsimran Julka for TechinAsia 

Till now, if you were an Uber user in India who wanted to hail a cab anywhere outside the country, you would have had to mandatorily register a credit card on your account.

But most Indian internet users don’t have a credit card. India, with its over 350 million internet users, has just 21 million credit card users.

But today onwards, Paytm wallet users can hail an Uber cab and pay with the online wallet at any of the 400-odd cities Uber runs in. Paytm has tied up with Uber for this.

Paytm is currently the one of the largest digital transactions platforms in India, bypassing India’s biggest online retailer Flipkart which ships about 8 million products a month.

In comparison, Paytm does 2 million transactions a day. However, most of them are online recharges.

“We are aiming at about 1 billion transactions a day annually by next year,” Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CEO and founder of Paytm, told Tech in Asia.

“We will become the cheapest online wallet transaction mechanism and are moving to a zero transaction fee vision,” adds Vijay.

The collaboration with Paytm is a part of Uber’s larger collaboration with Alipay. Alibaba Group is a large strategic investor in Paytm.

“The collaboration aims to bring better experiences for Uber’s users globally,” said Eric Alexander, head of business, Uber Asia-Pacific.

“This integration is available internationally, in 68 overseas countries and territories, including the US,” Eric said.

Paytm is also moving toward a zero transaction fee model for its users.

Then, how will it make money? The company is aiming to use online recharges as a mode to pull users to its online commerce marketplace, which sells a wide range of products – from cutlery and apparel to electronics.

The company is also aiming to build a new vertical of financial services such as insurance and banking via the payments banking licence it received from the Indian government last year.

First appeared at TechinAsia