After the announcement of the government's currency replacement program (on 8th Nov 2016), we noted a surge in app downloading activity of both third-party providers and banks. Over the last 4-6 weeks, that momentum has tapered off but remains higher than the levels seen prior to the demonetization announcement.
App download activity has tapered off from Nov/Dec 2016 levels but still at 1.3-2x activity before currency replacement program was announced (indexed to 100 on Nov 8th).
The payment service providers are increasing their merchant network significantly to augment their use case. Over the last 2-3 months, Paytm has expanded its presence within offline merchants notably -- it has over 2mn registered merchants, of which ~1mn were signed up in the last 80 days of 2016. MobiKwik added ~0.9mn merchants and 10mn users in the past two months. Paytm announced partnerships with many offline retail brands and most recently with over 41k petrol pumps across the country.
