One97 Communications, which owns digital payment brand Paytm, plans to bring 10 million merchants by 2025 on the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce platform, a top company official said.

Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said that the company has seen close to 11.8 million customers routed to its product from the ONDC platform.

"Paytm's ecosystem is built around small merchants and the mission that we are on is to help small merchants and small businesses become part of the mainstream economy. We did it by payments. Everybody to whom we have given new payments wants to have new customers. That is when ONDC comes. We plan to bring 10 million merchants on ONDC before 2025 ends," Sharma said.

He was speaking on the sidelines of an ONDC event.

ONDC is a government-backed platform which is open for all e-commerce stakeholders to onboard their service and utilise services of firms like Paytm, PhonePe's Pincode, and hyperlocal e-commerce firm magicpin present on the platform.

Sharma said that ONDC has more than 10 million customers onboard which is one-fifth of the total e-commerce market in the market.

"If you bring a large number of merchants, customers are out there and searching for them. Obviously, the issue of trust and discovery has to be sorted out but there are a large number of customers who are ready to come online and shop," he said.

ONDC managing director and CEO, T Koshy said that ONDC started operations recently.

"In January we had around 1,200 transactions. This month we have almost 5 million transactions. We have found transactions are happening from 600 cities already. People are figuring out how to shop whenever they get access from national-level apps. It is the beginning of an avalanche in the next 1-2 years. We aim to add one more zero to the current level of transactions in a year," Koshy said.

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