Over 85 million people now use Paytm mobile wallet for transactions worth Rs 700 crore every month.
Credit and debit cards issued by all banks saw 150 million transactions in March 2015 (the latest month for which these figures are available). The comparable figures for the same month for Paytm were 75 million, founder and chairman Vijay Shekhar Sharma said, confirming the request made to the RBI.
"RBI set the Rs 10,000 limit some years ago. We believe that the right limit today could be Rs 25,000," Sharma told ET.
In major metros and large cities, where cost of living and mobile penetration are high, customers are crossing the Rs 10,000 limit set by the RBI.
Under the existing RBI norms, only a minimum know your customer (KYC) of the mobile number and e-mail id verification is sufficient to hold Rs 10,000 in a mobile wallet. For anything higher, a full KYC, similar to what is required for opening of a bank account, is mandatory.
"Half a million customers spend more than Rs 10,000 (through Paytm) now. We see this growing to a million," said Sharma. "There is tremendous demand."
He expects Paytm's volume of transactions to overtake all POS transactions put together by the end of the year.
Indians, both with and without bank accounts, are finding mobile wallets a convenient way to pay for a number of goods and services such as online purchases, recharges, utility payments and online-to-offline services such as cabs or food ordering. The ease of use and security features of mobile wallets have eliminated the need for carrying large amounts of cash, especially for daily payments such as taxi fares.
Mobile recharges are also now mostly electronic pushing up transaction volumes.
One97 Communications, which has investment from the Alibaba group, is also building a mobile marketplace, and aims to have half a billion Indians on the Paytm platform before 2020 and be the country's largest consumer facing platform.
Sharma is also one of the applicants for a payments bank licence, along with other wallet providers such as MobiKwik and Oxigen.
"We will support a move to enhance the limit," said MobiKwik CEO and co-founder Bipin Preet Singh. "For someone in Kolhapur this limit may be sufficient but someone in Gurgaon, Mumbai or Bengaluru, it may not be enough," he added. While MobiKwik has not made any representation to the RBI, Singh said it would be useful if the central bank considered raising the limit at least for specific circles, similar to telecom licences. MobiKwik has 17 million customers.
Banks have also started offering mobile wallets to users and since they have done a full KYC, their mobile wallets are not restricted by any cap unlike those of mobile wallet providers. Many of them, such as HDFC Bank, have started marketing this as key advantage over third party mobile providers.
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