Masayoshi Son-led SoftBank Group will team up with India’s Paytm to launch a digital payments service in Japan. SoftBank, which has invested in Paytm, said on Friday that the service will be launched in autumn through a joint venture with Yahoo Japan Corp.
The service PayPay will be launched by SoftBank’s joint venture PayPay Corporation, SoftBank said in a statement.
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“PayPay Corporation will team up with India’s largest digital payments company Paytm, a SoftBank Vision Fund portfolio company, to utilise Paytm’s technology and expertise in mobile payments,” it added.
In Japan, cash is still the mainstream payment methodology, with the current cashless payment ratio remaining at 20 per cent. The Japanese government is taking measures to raise the cashless payment ratio to 40 per cent by 2025. To aid these efforts, SoftBank and Yahoo Japan established PayPay Corporation in June this year and will launch its user-oriented payments platform in fall of 2018, it added.
“This will promote the broader use of cashless payment in Japan and provide highly convenient services to both consumers and affiliated stores,” SoftBank noted. “We want to build a Paytm model on local AI that allows us to take mobile payments to a large population where other digital methods have not fully penetrated,” Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder & CEO – Paytm, said. Paytm offers seamless mobile payments to over 300 million customers and 8 million merchants in India.
Japan is lagging behind other countries in areas such as fintech and the Japanese government is trying to promote the uptake of digital payments, reported Reuters.
Technology firms, telecoms operators and banks are increasingly offering such services in Japan.