Digital wallets and payments ventures riding the
demonetisation wave are seeing initial growth numbers fade. Companies say while the dramatic surge of the first 10 days post the note ban is over, the
cash crunch
continues to fuel demand.
Payment gateway firm
PayU India
CEO Amrish Rau said they had an 80% growth in the first week but that’s now down to about 20-25%. "After the sharp uptick November 8 to 19, things are returning to normal. In the first phase, we saw about 20 lakh transactions a day, excluding small ticket purchases like mobile recharges. That’s now 14 lakh transactions a day.”
Rau said communication to the masses promoting card usage will help more than offering multiple products that can confuse. "There are 600 million cards out there — if used, it’ll ease the situation.” Payment gateway firm Razorpay’s co-founder Harshil Mathur says, "Adequate cash is still not back in the system so people are using more digital instruments but the spike is not as much as the first seven to 10 days.
"We bring on board about 1,000 merchants a month — this shot up to 300 in the first 10 days.” The spike helped acquire new customers and merchants "We’ve added 5 million users to take the count to 40 million; number of merchants shot up to 2.5 lakh from 1 lakh,” said Bipin Preet Singh, founder and CEO of Mobikwik.
From a peak of 5 million transactions per day, it’s now doing 1.5 million to 2 million a day. Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s Paytm saw transactions grow three times since October after it hit a peak of 7 million transactions per day within a week of demonetisation. Freecharge says its highest increase has been in the online food category especially among neighbourhood delivery joints.