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-   -   PayTM FASTag: Are you keeping it or ditching it? (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/street-experiences/276845-paytm-fastag-you-keeping-ditching-23.html)

I applied for closure of my two tags on 21 March, and yesterday (26 March) the process was completed and I received the refund into my wallet. I transferred everything out (emptied the wallet) this morning - now it is showing 0 balance. All done.

Refund was 250+150 = 400 for one car and 200+150 = 350 for the other, total of 750.

Since the only reason I had a wallet on Paytm was for Fastag, I have now raised the request to close that as well (Menu > Help & Support > Wallet > Queries not related to orders > I want to close my wallet from the Chatbot options). Just two taps and the request was placed with a promised 2-day SLA.

Our 03 vehicles had Paytm Fastag. I got Airtel Fastags for all three from a Fastag stall near a Toll Plaza on 18-03-2024. The person asked for RC copies, Aadhaar Card and Mobile No. linked with Aadhaar Card. It was activated instantly. And all three Fastags are under one single Airtel Wallet (Bharosa Savings Account). The Transaction History ALA Paytm is available in Airtel too. Also Statement can also be downloaded if needed.


I closed the Paytm Fastags as soon as these were activated. The money was refunded within 3 days to the Paytm Wallet without any follow-up.

Since you mentioned that your account is a Bharosa savings account, I think there is an annual fee for this savings account that gets applied every year. If you are not using any of the specific features of Bharosa, I would suggest you to convert it to 'Basic' account which should not have any fees associated with it yearly.

This was actioned within an hour. The ticket was updated with the closure confirmation before 8.30 AM yesterday (request was placed at 7.35 AM). I have now uninstalled the app as well.

So I've been frustrated dealing with Airtel Payments Bank regarding this fastag order. The tag for one car got issued and delivered in about 7-8 days, however the other order got stuck somewhere. I tried my level best to try and resolve this (phone/email), unfortunately the level of incompetence is incomprehensible. Finally I just asked them to cancel both my orders and refund the payment, and that too is pending since March 22nd, even after multiple follow-ups.
Today, I have escalated the issue from their site (not sure whether it even helps) and also emailed their grievance officer.

Anyway, please avoid Airtel Fastag, cause they tend to screw up every now and then. I understand that things can go wrong with any service provider, however with Airtel, there is no real hope in any resolution.

After all this, I went ahead with IDFC and the customer support is way better. I was also able to get the Rs 300 charged for their Max addon credited to my Fastag wallet. There was also an issue with auto recharge, which they did address in a timely manner with continuous followup from their side to ensure I was satisfied.
The tags too were delivered on the 2nd working day.

After closing Paytm fastag I applied for the HDFC one @150 with 100rs discount. The HSFC tag cost 50% of what most banks are charging initially and includes 100rs security deposit and 50rs balance.




However I noticed that the 250rs security refund of Paytm tag is not getting in my wallet balance. On calling their customer care they informed that since Paytm wallet is not working, no inward deposit can be made and I need to submit my bank details where they will deposit the amount in next 2 weeks :Frustrati
Should have closed the tag earlier when the wallet was active.

My first travel with HDFC fastag onward journey from BLR to Kerala. No issues encountered, finger crossed for return trip. All recharges done via GPay.

Hi mohit,
I am facing the same issue. Did you get some resolution?
Paytm was so much simpler to use

I got 2 HDFC fastags recently. One was ordered through PayTM with the Rs.100/- discount offer and after a few days, I got another one from HDFC directly (since Paytm discount offer was for only 1 tag). Since I used the same mobile number, both tags share a common wallet. I can recharge any fastag through PayTM (in the backend the wallet is loaded) easily. This is what I wanted, however, the wallet balance cannot be used anywhere else except the fastag.

Hi Vikram,

Not much help from the bank here. I had to close one of the tags and went to the nearest toll plaza which had a ICICI Fastag rep. Asked him to issue two new tags and link them to the active customer ID. Created a one wallet which then acts as a common wallet for all 3 tags.

In case you know someone at the local ICICI branch or have a RM, pls ask them to assist.

Good luck!

I replaced PayTM tags with IDFC ones. Their app experience is pretty decent. Customer service over email is also prompt. I expected their pool account to work like PayTM where I don’t charge individual tags but it doesn’t. One needs to use their app to transfer money from the pool account to a tag - which is not such a big improvement over directly transferring to the tag say using UPI. I am not sure about the purpose of their pool account, other than that, things are working smoothly.

Edit: I had a bad experience where my car sitting at home was incurring toll charges due to some glitch and Paytm was deducting from my wallet balance and there was no easy way to stop the deduction. In that sense, it’s better not to have a pool account and deal with the minor inconvenience of recharging each tag.

You can enable the autopay/autocharge under pool account after which you don’t have to transfer the amount manually.

Now I have enabled auto charge the pool account once the balance goes below 500, let me see how it goes.

Same thing happened with me around 10 times. And PayTM resolved all the disputes promptly (but slowly).

I agree, the structuring of the pool account seems a bit confusing. Even though there is a pool account, the debits happen from the individual tag account.

With auto pool, this step is managed automatically for you. Whenever a debit is triggered from the tag, the amount gets transferred from pool account to tag account. So with auto pool enabled, the tag balance shows as 0 always. Not sure why it’s setup this way, directly linking the pool account to the tag makes more sense. The way it is now, we see a lot of debit and credit transactions in the statement, all internal transfers. Simply complicating things.

The auto recharge also works well now, I’ve set Rs 1000 as the threshold and a few minutes after a debit transaction which brings the balance less than the threshold, the auto recharge happens. I like this better than Paytm auto topup, as in case of Paytm the auto topup gets triggered only the next day.
Not sure if auto recharge works with non IDFC credit card users though, as I only see IDFC credit cards as a payment method for auto recharge.

In hindsight, closing the fastag while the PayTM wallet was still active seems to be the prudent step.
The 150 balance was successfully credited to the PayTM wallet, but the 250 security deposit shows as a failed transaction. Will need to follow up for the same.

In my case was able to transfer the remaining PayTM wallet balance to my bank account seamlessly as KYT was in place.
However folks whose PayTM wallet is not KYC compliant are unable to transfer the remaining balance to their bank account.

Just received my HDFC fastag today and have installed the same on the vehicle. Had to do an e-KYC and a video KYC before they shipped the same. Wonder why just the traditional e-KYC (Aadhar based) is not sufficient to avail the fastag.
I was trying to setup an auto-topup so that whenever the fastag balance falls below a set amount, it gets auto topped up from the bank, haven't found this feature yet for the HDFC fastag.

Any update from Paytm on the 250Rs security refund?