For its 9.8 million offline merchants that Paytm claimed in November 2018 had launched ‘instant bank settlement’ service in the same month to settle the collected payments as per their preferred time or do an instant settlement directly into their bank accounts.

“Paytm has a huge network of merchants and creating such an O2O platform for them is a logical move. It also adds as an additional touch point in customers’ journey as it becomes frictionless for them to use the platform itself. It is a strategic move,” Pavel Naiya, Senior Analyst at Counterpoint Research told Financial Express Online.

Paytm Payment Gateway offers payment solutions for merchants including instant plug-and-play to deep merchant platform integrations. The company provides Software Development Kits, developer APIs and checkout solutions to help businesses with their custom payment requirements, Paytm said in a statement.

“Frictionless recurring payments is a critical element of subscription businesses,” said Kiran Vasireddy, COO, Paytm.

“This kind of service has evolved over time that provides loyalty options to customers to buy from the same merchant over time and get benefits. There is a huge untapped opportunity in the segment in India as people make online and offline payments using the app,” said Naiya.

Paytm had last week announced a credit score check facility on its app that would provide information about their credit utilizations and repayment history based on the age of the credit accounts.

A similar facility was launched by Paytm investor Alibaba’s financial services affiliate Ant Financial called Sesame Credit in January 2015 for individual credit scores of customers and small business owners. Tencent has also been reportedly testing a credit score feature for WeChat Pay.