In the good old days, when you wanted to pay Tom, you whipped out your wallet and handed over cash or your cheque book and wrote his name and handed over the cheque to him. Things were quite simple.
Then banks introduced electronic payments. You no longer made a payment to Tom but to his Account Number and Sort / IFSC / BIC code.
Banks and / or Regulators thought people would eventually become comfortable with paying numbers rather than names. Didn’t happen. People still wanted to pay by names, not numbers.
So, they launched new-age payment products where people could make payments to a mobile phone number (or email address). Venmo, Zelle, PopMoney, PayTM and PhonePe are a few examples of such products. The assumption here was that a mobile number is a simple thing with 10 digits, it’s used by people everyday for a lot of things, so they won’t make mistakes while entering it to make a payment transaction. Probably not true, at least not for the majority, going by this question.
It looks like many people – me included – still want the comfort of making payments to names, rather than numbers.
Anyway, to answer your question, it’s not possible to know the Beneficiary’s Name before making a PayTM payment. You still make the PayTM payment to a mobile number. If you pay a wrong mobile number, your money is lost. Period.
Back in the day, when you entered the mobile number to which you wanted to make a payment, PayTM would display the name. But it was simply the name under which the entered mobile phone number was stored in your phonebook. There was no guarantee that the name displayed by PayTM was the name of the actual owner of the entered mobile number. When I just checked, I found that PayTM does not specify any Beneficiary name at all. Instead the app simply says “Receiver will receive INR 1 in Paytm Wallet linked to 99******84”, and asks the Payor to confirm the payment transaction based on that.