SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) – Paytm, India’s top mobile payment company, announced it has received approval from the Reserve Bank of India to launch a digital bank.
The project has long been the brainchild of the company’s founder and chief executive, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, who confirmed that he will “take a full-time executive role” in the program. Sharma provided no info as to when the program might launch, but local media reported the bank could be introduced in as little as 60 days.
Sharma spun Paytm from his original company, content firm One97, in 2010. He raised money for the venture from Ant Financial, the financial services affiliate of Alibaba, a company which itself invested in
Paytm’s $1 billion valuation. Sharma has raised $760 million from investors for
Paytm to date, and the company could soon be worth $6 billion according to reports of fresh investment, meaning it could become a leading brand in the Business banking industry. However, there is still a long way for Paytm to go before joining the elites, at least according to Sharma.
“At Paytm Payments Bank, our aim is to build a new business model in banking industry, focussed on bringing financial services to 100’s of millions of un-served or underserved Indians,” Sharma wrote in a blog post. “With power of technology and innovation-at-scale, we aim to become a benchmark in world of banking.”
Paytm seeks to make banking more accessible. Sharma said the bank will work with traditional banks “to offer loans for lending [and] share data.” Sharma’s longterm goal for the bank is to see it support half a billion of India’s residents,
Paytm is initially targeting 200 million banking and mobile wallet accounts within the next year.
“In India, [there are] only 200-300 million people with banking services,” Sharma added. “We should get aggressive on them then add services like lending, wealth management [in partnership] with existing players.
“It’s about new customers who haven’t been concerned with banking before [and] showing that there’s a business model based on transactions not just wealth management.”
