PayTM: Paying with plastic

Paying monthly bills in Canada using your credit card should be a simple task. Given the vast majority of utility services providers have an online presence, you would think the options available to Canadians would be vast. However, the options aren’t as abundant. That’s where we think PayTM steps in and gives options for Canadians to pay their bills.

Before we give our entire review of PayTM and truly introduce them, let’s go over a few basic things about third-party payment providers. 

The basics

First, these are not the utility provider and they are not your bank. At the core, these are service providers which means they intend to get compensated for their services. So translation, they’re not free.

Second, don’t expect if you are behind on your bills to get a payment sent immediately. These services, even when you verify your account, have to send manual payments to the companies that received them. So this takes a few days and won’t generally happen overnight. So, if your utility provider offers direct credit card payments that is probably a better option in that case. 

What these services do well is make it easy and convenient to schedule either immediate or future credit card payments and generally earning rewards for doing so. The setting and account up with this service takes around 15 to 20 minutes, then only minutes thereafter to complete payments. 

In the case of Paytm, the company not only enables you to use your credit card to earn rewards but also rewards its users for taking advantage of its service. These rewards while they may not be as aggressive as the credit card rewards and do little to offset the actual cost of the payments, they do provide a small incentive for continuing to use the service. 

What are the fees?

With PayTM the fees associated with processing bill payments vary depending on the type of card or source of funds to pay your bills. 
With credit cards Paytm fees are:

• Bank Accounts: No fees
• Paytm Cash: No fees
• Visa Credit & Mastercard Credit: 2.0% (all categories except taxes), 2.5% (tax category)
• Visa Debit & Mastercard Debit: 1.25%
• American Express: 3%

These fees can get in the way of making larger payments through their service but can definitely make it more convenient to pay your bills. Particularly when the alternative may be using bill payments from your own bank account at a major financial institution, some users will likely find the bonus of the convenience of a credit card to be a great incentive. 

During our testing of the service, we predominantly scheduled and made our payments using the mobile app for Android. The app is well laid out and is frequently updated. 

We went through the setup and configuration process on our mobile device and completed our payments with ease. Finding our billers including small institutions or utilities was particularly easy. Setting up recurring or frequent payments was simple.

Our only concern is actually the support services that are provided by the company and the ability to reach someone when things go wrong. During our testing, we had to reach out to the company using their support ticket system and had some difficulty completing our task. We could not contact anyone by phone to troubleshoot. That being said ultimately our issue was resolved to our satisfaction but took longer than we believe it should.

The verdict

Overall we were particularly pleased with the service. It offers convenient easy to use and practical options for Canadians to pay their monthly bills and offers modest rewards. We would like to see the service offer some sort of package or plan to help reduce the service fees associated with payments, but we were content with their present offering.

We would recommend Paytm for its reliability and convenience. Learn more here or download their app here.