Who Needs Cash To Pay For Parking Anymore? No need to look for loose change when parking your car.
By Ritu Kochar
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There aren't many places left in this country where you wouldn't find a "Paytm accepted here' sticker pasted on shop doors. The phenomenon is reaching far and wide.
The largest wallet provider in India, Paytm has tapped another unclaimed market with its tie up with multiple parking-management companies. With this, consumers will now be able to offer cashless payments for parking as well.
Embarked on a journey to expand the use of cashless payments across the country, Paytm has already tied up with more than 500 parking lots, which includes merchants like SA Parking, Secure and DAPS, which are already live with select parking lots, according to economic times.com. The procedure will be same as other Paytm payments where you pay using QR code and barcode scanners.
"The need of the hour is ease of payments and faster turnaround times, all of which is possible with cashless transactions," said Kiran Vasireddy, vice-president, Paytm to Economic Times.
Paytm's growth over the past months has been an aggressive one. They have extensively worked on expanding its offline market by including 'paan' shops, vegetable vendors, "kirana' shops, providing hyper local delivery services and also covering food chains, petrol pumps and what not.
Including parking payments to this list, they wish to claim the Rs 2,000-crore parking market in India. The company said it plans to convert 25% of the cash transactions in parking to digital payments in the next two quarters.
Leading by example, Paytm has definitely learnt from its largest-investor Alipay who offers parking payments as one of its wallet use cases in China. This goes directly in line to fulfilling their goal to double its offline-merchant and 'kirana' store network to reach four million merchants this year.
Ease in paying parking fees is very welcomed, but if only anyone would do something about the problem of parking spaces in cities like Delhi, it would be great.