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In a bid to drive cashless transactions in the offline market, mcommerce giant Paytm, will remove the ‘merchant fees’ for all wallet transactions that happen offline.
When a customer pays a merchant, a charge is levied per transaction on the merchant by banks. These charges coupled with the need for a specialized physical hardware and its associated costs, discourage merchants to accept digital payments. Charges vary from 0.5% to 2.5%, depending on various parameters. Some merchants make customers bear this additional cost by charging them extra, which deters the customers from paying digitally.
Nitin Misra, head of payment products at Paytm, said, “By Paytm’s eliminating this cost, an immense opportunity is created to digitize the 95% of India which still deals in cash. One of the reasons the current adoption of digital payments is low is because the existing cashless systems were not made for the mobile first world.”
In October 2014, Paytm had rolled out a QR code based payment product to enable small shopkeepers or auto drivers to receive payments. Paytm customers using their Paytm app, can now scan a pre-printed Paytm code anywhere they see a ‘Paytm accepted here’ sticker & make payments swiftly and securely.
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