India’s largest payment gateway, Paytm PG today announced that it is empowering mobile phone and DTH top-up retailers to make cashless payments for bulk recharge buys from telecom and satellite television service distributors. This service also promotes the government's digitisation plans and reduces the flow of cash within the system. Retailers for mobile phone and DTH recharges usually make most of their payments to distributors of bulk top-ups in cash. However, with the ongoing pandemic companies are hoping to reduce dependency on cash and make the process digital.

The company has already tied up with Vodafone Idea Limited to be the exclusive partner of the telecom major for retailer payments. Paytm PG now powers Vi's internal merchant app that enables its lakhs of offline mobile phone recharge retailers to make bulk payments for top-ups to the company's distributors. Retailers can transact digitally with their respective distributors for purchasing stock. All they need to do is log in with their credentials into Vi's merchant app, enter the value of the bulk top-up amount, and pay via the options provided by Paytm to make payments to the distributor. It saves distributors time in collecting cash, reconciliation, and bank deposit. It also helps the company bring in transparency into the whole process as everything is digitised and recorded online.

Paytm said that it is targeting over 50,000 distributors of leading telecom and DTH service providers to start accepting payments digitally from retailers by the year-end. The company is eyeing close to Rs 500 crore per month in business volume from these transactions by next year.

Abhay Sharma, Senior Vice President - Paytm, "Our Paytm PG empowers retailers all over the country to promote less cash transactions and digitise their operations. We aim to reduce the dependency of cash and time taken by distributors in collecting, reconciling, and depositing it in banks. We believe that organisations across the country are now reducing the flow of currency within the firms and banking more on digital payments for more seamless and transparent operations. We hope to partner with more telecom and DTH operators across the country and power their payments with our PG."