NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

In a bold move, the country’s largest mobile wallet Paytm will hive off its bread-and-butter payments business as a separate app, with the current app focusing on shopping. This will put the Alibaba-backed Paytm in direct confrontation with the deep-pocketed dedicated e-commerce players including Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal.

Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said the payments market (Paytm has more than 100 million registered customers) has reached the long-tail of Indian consumers, where the app requirements are different from that which urban English speaking customers needed.

The main app, which will morph into an e-commerce app, will continue to offer the wallet option for some time, but will prompt users to download the independent app for wallet use cases. The company is running pilots now and will launch the second app in January.