NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of Paytm, was one of the two individuals, besides nine other entities, to be granted a payments bank licence. He believes that being a payments bank, Paytm can now provide its customers with a three-step life cycle comprising pay, buy and save. 

"Our primary strategy is to double down on growth of mobile internet in this country. Paytm exists because of mobile internet," he says. 

In an interaction with VCCircle, Sharma discusses plans to start payments bank operations and why he decided to go alone rather than tie up with a bank. He also points to his goal to add half a billion users to the Paytm platform by 2020. 

From an e-commerce platform catering to mobile and utility bills, you have come a long way to be given licence for a payments bank. Tell us about Paytm’s journey.

When we started, we had a plan that we will start our journey from building customer trust and extending that trust cycle to many more use cases. We started with payments and then it grew towards buy, which is where the market place came in and now we have been given opportunity to make it to the third level which is save. Our platform will give customer a three-step life cycle—pay, buy and save.

Paytm claims to have 100 million mobile users. How many users are you adding each month?

When we add a user or create a user, he/she must have a done a transaction on the wallet. We today have over 100 million wallets and close to 30-35 million of them are transacting every month. Our target is to have half a billion Indians on our payment platform by 2020.