Paytm is expanding its Paytm Inbox product with SMS capability. So far, Inbox has turned into news aggregator (with articles from Zee Business, News24 and more), a TV (with livestreams of channels like Republic TV, Times Now, and Bloomberg Quint), and a game arcade (which is run in partnership with Gamepind). The final tab is the actual Inbox part of Paytm Inbox, the chat. Paytm Inbox also has encrypted messaging, with the option to delete sent messages, like WhatsApp. You could say that this is Paytm's way of getting people to use messaging, akin to WhatsApp getting into payments. Unlike WhatsApp though, Paytm wants to integrate with SMS, which Facebook's other messaging app Messenger has already done. Mobile operating systems generally disallow users from using multiple SMS apps simultaneously, so Paytm will have to be the default messaging app for users to use SMS on it. Paytm put out a blog post on Monday touting its SMS organiser's spam detection through "machine learning algorithms". It's highly similar to Microsoft's SMS Organiser, which has over half a million installs on Android. In 2015, Truecaller had introduced a similar service with a Truemessenger SMS app. Truemessenger claims to have an automated spam filter, for the Indian market and essentially needs to be set as default SMS app for the phone. Of course, the prospect of Paytm handling users' SMS messages — which include financial and other transaction notification details — did not fly under Elliot Anderson's radar too long after Paytm's blog post: https://twitter.com/fs0c131y/status/1046686958062309376
