Paytm Efficiently Scales to Manage Millions of Devices Using AWS IoT Services

As one of the largest payment gateways in India, Paytm manages and processes financial transactions for millions of consumers and merchants. Among its most popular IoT solutions are Soundbox devices, which provide audio confirmations for merchants accepting payments from Paytm QR codes. Paytm’s Dynamic QR Code service lets enterprises accept contactless in-store payments through the Paytm app. The company had managed its IoT devices using a cloud-based system controlled by a third-party provider, which was challenging to scale and maintain.

Acknowledging that it required an advanced and robust solution, Paytm initially explored building its own IoT management system. To bring more merchants into its system, however, the company needed a level of scalability that would be expensive and time-consuming to achieve on its own. Having been an AWS customer for nearly 10 years, the Paytm team knew that it could rely on AWS services to build a secure, reliable solution.

In only a few months, Paytm migrated its fleet of IoT devices to AWS. By using a range of AWS IoT services instead of building its own solution, it has saved on infrastructure costs and labor, freeing its development team to focus on building innovative and differentiated services for its customers.

Paytm first worked to build a scalable and stable IoT architecture using AWS IoT services, using a custom authorization feature to authenticate and register a large set of IoT devices and to facilitate communications between each device and internal applications. Then, it built a comprehensive device management system to organize, monitor, and remotely manage IoT devices at scale and facilitated security monitoring and management across its fleet of IoT devices.

Using various solutions, Paytm has gained greater control over and visibility into the health of its large device base. This visibility has particularly benefited its maintenance team, helping them address customer issues.

At the same time, Paytm has improved system performance. Every month, it can perform over-the-air updates for a large number of IoT devices simultaneously. The broadcast on Soundbox happens almost instantaneously after the customer completes a transaction on the Paytm app through All-in-One QR, yet another of Paytm’s innovations. The system sees availability of up to 99.99 percent and quickly recovers from network outages without intervention.

“The AWS team has helped us address technology problems to a great extent, particularly hardware-related IoT challenges,” says Prateek Tuli, associate vice president of Paytm. “This has empowered Paytm to build a very robust, resilient, and scalable solution that is deployed in various geographies, ranging from major cities to remote areas. The predictable behavior of our technology helps us win the trust of our customers and merchants.”

Paytm has also vastly reduced incidents of fraud, improving its brand recognition and credibility among merchants. Previously, some consumers used screenshots from previous transactions to trick merchants into confirming payments. With the introduction of AWS IoT services into its fleet of Soundbox devices, Paytm has reduced fraud complaints to nearly zero and further improved transparency and trust among its customers.

“Our devices have a virtually 100 percent success rate, which means that there is no fraud if our devices are being used by merchants throughout their businesses,” says Akhil Billa, product manager for IoT devices at Paytm. “Our customers are extremely happy with the product because it’s a low effort for them to manage.”

With these highly scalable solutions, Paytm is increasing the number of IoT devices in its system on AWS. By making the solution simpler to use, more merchants have adopted Paytm solutions for their businesses. The company adds close to one million devices every quarter, reaffirming its position as a market leader.