Paytm suspends in-app chat feature owing to costs involved in scaling

Payments solution and digital wallet company Paytm, which is backed by major investors like Berkshire Hathaway and Softbank, has confirmed that it has pulled out the in-app chat feature available in its Inbox due to high scaling costs. The Inbox feature, supposedly, would now focus mostly on content through news, videos and games.

Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma stated that the company has taken off chat from Paytm App even though it become quite popular, as it would not be possible to scale the code base without a ton of costs. Paytm’s Inbox feature, which was introduced last year will still be available and is to be upgraded with social features, he had mentioned.

Deepak Abbot, senior vice president of Paytm was quoted saying that the company had stopped new users from boarding its chat feature the previous week, after it hit the infrastructure capacity. The chat feature has been temporarily halted until the company has a bigger infrastructure and a dedicated team. Abbot hinted at a timeframe of six weeks before they begin onboarding again.

Abbot added that since chat was considered to be an additional feature, the company had gone wrong in its calculations but was now giving a more serious commitment to it. He informed that the chat feature had nearly 30 to 40 million users and under 10 million active users, with most of the messages being related to transactions done on the platform.

The Paytm Inbox had a total of 100 million monthly active users, Abbot further confirmed. He insisted that Paytm is not looking to compete with WhatsApp and other such companies to become another chat platform. It aims to make communication easier among users as well as between users and merchants on in-app transactions.

According to records, the popular messaging platform WhatsApp had also entered the payments segment earlier in the year on the back of UPI. This has now pegged the American company as a competitor of Paytm.