Paytm looks to add about $500 million in eWallets

Mobile payments and commerce firm Paytm expects customers to add about $500 million in their wallets in 2016, a tenfold increase over this year, its founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said. "In 2015, we saw wallets become mainstream. Next year, as more and more businesses push marketing dollar spends to cashbacks and wallets, the recharge value and frequency will steadily increase," Sharma told ET. The projection of $500 million does not include cashbacks that the company offers its customers on e-commerce transactions, Sharma said. Cashback is an incentive programme through which Paytm offers a fixed sum or a percentage of the amount spent back to the wallet holder's account to encourage use of the wallet. Shekhar Sharma said he expects to see startups that offer a lot of extras including loans and insurances built on top of wallets next year, thereby replacing or at the least competing with credit cards. "This is already a very hot use case in China," he said. The Noida-based company, which says it has 110 million wallet users, is also betting big on its offline play to boost wallet transactions and become a ubiquitous debit card.