India’s largest mobile wallet Paytm has announced plans to invest $900 million in the development of a new QR-based payments service for retail merchants in India.

The investment will be used to build the back-end for QR code-based payments, enabling secure transactions at low bandwidth and with low-end smartphones.

There are currently over five million Indian merchants using the Paytm QR code network, but the firm has set itself a target of enrolling one million offline merchants each months and reach 10 million merchants using the solution by December 2017.

Kiran Vasireddy, senior vice-president at Paytm, commented: “Our 0 per cent merchant transaction fee, coupled with an aggressive merchant acquisition rate, will help us take QR code-based payments to every nook and corner of this country. We will invest Rs 600 crore ($900m) this calendar year, which will be used for scaling up merchant acquisition teams, marketing and cash-backs.”

The announcement from the Alibaba-backed firm follows the roll-out of a new mobile point of sale (PoS) system to make it easier for merchants to accept card-based payments.

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