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02 paytm fintech

Paytm Case Study

Paytm creates a social payment experience with Sendbird

02 paytm fintech
333M
total users
1B+
messages
85%+
customers satisfied with new functionality and speed of chat

Customer
Paytm

Product
Chat

Vertical
Fintech

Country
India

Banner background mobile
Send notifications that remain accessible in your app
Banner background mobile
Send notifications that remain accessible in your app

Customer
Paytm

Product
Chat

Vertical
Fintech

Country
India

Banner background mobile
Send notifications that remain accessible in your app

Paytm

Founded in 2010, Paytm is India’s leading financial services company that offers full-stack payments and solutions to consumers, offline merchants, and online platforms. Paytm’s mission is to bring half a billion Indians into the mainstream economy through payments, commerce, banking, investments, and financial services.

In March 2021 alone, Paytm recorded over 1.4 billion transactions. With over 21 million merchant partners on board, the company currently maintains the highest market share in offline payments in India. In addition, it is the only platform in the country that promotes all digital payments services, including Paytm Wallet, UPI, Paytm Postpaid, cards, and net banking.


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Business Challenge

Paytm saw chat as a potential game changer in increasing user engagement and satisfaction. Given this climate, Paytm’s product team sought to further innovate its user experience, and explore how it could better serve the millions of customers using the platform every day.

Traditionally, Paytm has viewed transaction history as simply a chronological list of payment records. However, the company wanted to address three different pillars and bring them to the forefront of the company’s money transfer interface:

  • Identity (who users are paying)
  • Context (why users are being paid)
  • Distribution (a payment ecosystem between users, businesses, partners, etc.)

Why Paytm Chose Sendbird

Paytm understood that building messaging functionality in-house would be an incredibly complex task. Payments would come from multiple service channels such as Paytm UPI, Paytm wallet, Paytm postpaid, Paytm payments bank, and more. According to Paytm Insider Head of Product Abhishek Madan, “all of these are presented in the same user experience. These are completely separate backends that have nothing to do with each other, and our attempt is to bring all of this data and show it in one place. It’s a massive tech complication.”

Furthermore, due to the heavily regulated nature of each product, developing chat in-house would be an immense compliance undertaking as well. Madan emphasizes that PMs would have to additionally oversee chat for the company’s “lending insurance and equity trading businesses, and to have all of these in one UX requires us to work very closely with compliance teams. Three years ago, each of these products was probably a standalone company.”

With the sheer scale of Paytm’s user base paired with its breadth of offerings, the company needed a service that could offload the complexity and resources necessary to stand up a high-functioning chat interface while simultaneously offer the features customers desired. With Sendbird, Paytm could concentrate on developing its core money transfer features and go to market quickly without the burdens that come with developing chat functionality. “The MVP bar for chat is so high that we would have to invest significant resources with this product complexity, this feature complexity of real-time messaging,” Madan explains, “along with our existing complexities, Sendbird really offloaded all of that from us.”

Resources Case Study Paytm UI

Results

Across its service suite, Paytm supports more than 333 million users, and in partnering with Sendbird, has sent over 1 billion messages to date. This scale is supported by the Sendbird Platform API, which has given Paytm the building blocks necessary to create many of its rich features and interfaces used today. Madan states, “when you think about Paytm, we’re pretty wide… We have all of these apps, and because of these platform APIs, I can build walled gardens that I can deploy into each of these apps. So the work I do once is reusable by every business unit inside Paytm. So Sendbird’s platform is a massive help.”

Within the Paytm main app, users have access to a messages section that Madan refers to as a “chat powered payments and engagement platform… and represents a change in how users look at transaction history.” Here, Paytm has invested in what it calls an “identities-first approach” where users can simply tap on a contact’s profile and instantly see a clear view of who they are, conversations discussed, what payments were made, when they occurred, and for what purpose. These actions link deeply within Paytm’s money transfer suite and allow for a convenient and rich experience for end-users, entirely contained within the company’s ecosystem.

In a survey of Paytm customers, over 85% of the user base was satisfied with both the new functionality and speed of chat within the application.

1) Since day one, Sendbird has partnered with AWS to establish itself as a leading conversations platform that enables a secure, global, and scalable in-app conversation experience. Sendbird is an AWS advanced tier technology partner operating 45+ AWS native services in 9 regions. Thanks to Amazon’s AWS Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, Sendbird manages massive digital traffic sending billions of messages monthly. Using Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route53 geolocation functions, Sendbird ensures reliable global traffic distribution. Sendbird also leverages AWS CloudFormation to automate its servers’ management in each region efficiently. Lastly, AWS Elasticache and Amazon Aurora allow Sendbird to achieve millisecond latency and data storage for over 300 million monthly active users. Sendbird’s world-class conversation platform architecture and technical foundations are certified by AWS.