If you were curious about Paytm, specifically the Canadian offering
from the Indian m-commerce giant, here are my observations after using it for almost a year. Spoiler alert: I uninstalled it from my phone yesterday.
I first came to understand Paytm as a competitor to
Plastiq, a service that lets you use your credit card to pay bills that typically don't accept credit cards—mortgage payments, car insurance, that sort of thing. That's no longer a fair fight, as VISA card payments have been suspended from the Paytm platform. You can, however, connect your chequing account and use it to pay your credit card bills. For this you are rewarded with Paytm points, one point per dollar up to a maximum of a thousand points per payment.
So what can you redeem this points for? This is where things start to unravel...
Here's a screen grab of a popular reward on Paytm. If you're confused, what's actually being offered here is $4 cash back if you purchase a $100 Amazon gift card
and redeem 1,000 points. The $4 goes into your Paytm balance, which can then be applied against your next transaction. In this way Paytm keeps you perpetually locked into using the service.
And for credit card payments the service isn't great. Paytm seems to need an extra 5 business days to process that specific type of transaction, so you'll have to remember to pay at least a week earlier than usual. It might be worth the hassle for better rewards; even one or two percent cash back would be fantastic on a transaction where you'd otherwise get nothing. But using the same example above I could extract more value out of that same gift card by buying it with an
AMEX Cobalt at a supermarket.
If you use a MasterCard and/or need to send money to someone in India, Paytm is worth looking in to. For me, though, the numbers just don't add up.
Still interested? Here are the app store links for
Android and
iOS.
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