Paytm to setup awareness camps across schools, villages to assist with cashless payments

Mobile payment and e-commerce platform Paytm on Monday announced that it is setting up awareness camps in every district to help the country go cashless. The Paytm team is conducting sessions and workshops across schools, colleges, village panchayats and trade bodies to serve the dual purpose of informing customers about the benefits of digital payments and tap into the widest set of merchants across the country, the company said in a statement. “Our aim is to reach every single market across all districts and assist millions of Indians in their efforts to adopt a digital lifestyle,” said Kiran Vasireddy, Senior Vice President, Paytm. Paytm has also made its user interface in Android available in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya and Punjabi. With this, the company has expanded its reach to over 80 per cent smartphone users in India who prefer internet-based services in regional languages, thus making mobile payments and commerce now accessible to all. This comes right after the Paytm seems to have taken the phrase, “imitation is the best form of flattery,” to heart and appears to have decided that the target of such “flattery” would be PayPal. PayPal took exception to Paytm’s trademark and today, on 18 November, submitted an opposition to the Paytm’s trademark application. Inc42 found the timing of PayPal’s filing to be interesting. Quoting Rahul Dev, a patent and business lawyer, Inc42 asks if it wasn’t a “calculated move to steal Paytm’s thunder.” This is because PayPal timed the filing of the opposition to the last day of expiry for filing an opposition against Paytm’s trademark application. With inputs from IANS