"We captured payments as a mindset." Digital payments company Paytm has reported 1.5 billion transactions for the financial year ended 31st March 2017, the company said today, and a gross merchandise value (GMV) of around $5 billion. Note that GMV refers to the value of goods sold, and is thus not indicative of net revenue. The company didn't share a timeframe for its much-delayed Payments Bank launch, saying that they're awaiting regulatory clearances. In terms of transactions, this is a 3x growth in the number of transactions over the previous year, its CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said at the press conference today. Sharma expects to hit 4 billion transactions next year, and he says they're already getting there, if the month of April 2017 is any indication."Till 26th of April (for this month), we have 255 million transactions. We're running a little short of 10 million transactions a day," Sharma said. A majority of Paytm's traffic- around 55% - comes from tier-2 and tier3 towns (note: Sharma said 'transactions' at the press conference, but the presentation referred to this as 'traffic'). "These are cities where people are less than a million. Only 45% is from metro cities," he said. Smaller cities like Durgapur and Sonipat have shown over 1000% growth in transactions for Paytm. Paytm has 218 million wallets, though it hasn't disclosed how many of these are active wallets (i.e., wallets with money stored in them), and how many of these users use Paytm daily. During the early days…
