Paytm is clearly ahead of competition, says CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma

Paytm is bigger than everybody else combined in the market, added the Paytm CEO

Infosys co-founder and Aadhaar architect Nandan Nilekani says Paytm founder and Chief Executive Vijay Shekhar Sharma is “democratising digital payments in the country and nobody has done a better job than him.” Nilekani also threw a challenge to Sharma to build Aadhaar-enabled payments system and allow Paytm to work on feature phones. In an interview with Peerzada Abrar & Yuvraj Malik, Sharma says when it comes to paying merchants; Paytm clearly dominates the market share. Edited excerpts:

At what stage has India leapfrogged in the fintech sector and have we gone beyond the WhatsApp moment in the financial sector? 

I think it is ubiquitous and everybody understands what it can do. People have their concerns if they are not on board yet as digital payment consumers or merchants. As far as the large cities are concerned, the penetration is incredibly big. I understand that people don’t use it too often every day, but that will happen once the penetration of merchants becomes even deeper. So, right now, with 10-15 million merchants, at Paytm, we still believe that we could have done another 15 million. There are people like street hawkers and auto-rickshaw drivers who are not even accounted for as small and medium enterprises.

Talking about the banking industry, start-ups in the fintech space, including players such as Paytm, are disrupting the financial services and banking industry. Are banks right to be afraid of the fintech boom in the country?

I always believe that we don’t need to disrupt the financial services or banking industry, we need to add to their capabilities. What SBI, HDFC or ICICI have done is phenomenal. What Paytm or Paytm Bank has to do is to serve another set of users. And, that is exactly where we will focus on. In other words, we believe that it is not imperative for us to grow so that somebody else needs to be disrupted. 

How do you view competition from players such as Google Pay, PhonePe and Amazon Pay? How do you see Paytm differentiating itself when compared to them in the next few years?

I think when it comes to paying a merchant, Paytm clearly, as the data shows, dominates the market share. Paytm is bigger than everybody else combined in the market. When it comes to person-to-person money transfer, it is not economic transactional value. 
 

But a lot of these players are also betting big on the financial services space?

My point is when it comes to merchant payments, we dominate and own the market share even after competitors have invested billions. Today, we launched IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Our commitment for merchant payment will remain till the time we acquire another 10 million merchants and so on. While person-to-person money transfer is big for our platform, it is not our primary business model.

You have been a big promoter of the data protection framework and said India’s data should be stringently domiciled. What are your concerns?

The reason for taking it (data) out should be legitimate. Why do you take the citizens data at all, or why are banks forced to store data in India? Why does the RBI or regulators push us to even host emails in India? What is the concern? So, the same concern is on the payments data. If a country’s economic activity data is available anywhere, that is a vulnerability. If two countries are fighting trade wars, it will be a super advantage (to the country that has the data).

How do you see the Indian economy growing?

As a new Indian company and as a young guy, I have a lot of high hopes for the future. Currently, I can go through my grunt (work). I am happy that we are sitting on the verge of creating another $2.5 trillion to the economy in five years, seven years or 10 years. I’m not the judge or economist (to predict it). This gives me an immense amount of energy and hope.