Payments growing more than 50% yearly: Paytm Founder Vijay Sekhar Sharma

The fall Paytm has witnessed in terms of share prices is nothing as compared to what other companies have gone through in the last six months in the global market, said Paytm founder Vijay Sekhar Sharma. Sharma was addressing a session at the 16th India Digital Summit organised by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) in association with Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and NITI Aayog.   

“South American companies are down by 71 per cent. Paytm is a payments company and payments has a derivative revenue line item in financial services driven by credit. We are growing more than 50 per cent yearly on payments services. We make profit,” added Sharma   

He stressed on the fact that in terms of offering credit, Paytm should be benchmarked against Bajaj Finance, a non-banking finance company (NBFC). “Paytm does more loans than Bajaj Finance. We not only make contribution profit in this line item, our partners are so happy that there are more partners in the queue than ever before,” Sharma said. Paytm offers loans in tie-up with lending partners.  

Sharma added that Paytm has achieved a milestone in three years that is on par with Bajaj Finance which has been in the credit business for the last 30 years. “Rather than chasing the ticket size, the better metrics will be quality of loan size. If we would have Rs 5,000 or Rs 10,000 as loan size, India would have been a better country today.  We have an average ticket size of Rs 4,000-plus,” he said.   

In Q2 FY22, Bajaj Finance delivered Rs 392 crore in personal loans and 26,989 cards in the credit card distribution business, as per data from the company. The number of loans disbursed by Paytm grew to over 2.8 million in Q2 FY 2022, aggregating to a total disbursal of Rs627 crore in Q2 FY22. The data for Q3 FY22 is yet to be published by Bajaj Finance, but as per the data released by Paytm, it disbursed 44 lakh loans worth Rs 2,180 crore during the quarter as compared to 8.81 lakh loans worth Rs 470 crore disbursed from its platform in the year-ago period.  

Paytm reported a net loss of Rs 473 crore for the September-ended quarter as compared to Rs 436 crore loss in the same period last year. This is 8 per cent wider than the previous quarter. The company attributed the loss to 40 per cent increase in expenses during the second quarter, which may include IPO expenses. According to the company’s report, it has spent over Rs 7 crore on its IPO.  

Despite the claims of growing profit, Paytm stock prices are down. Paytm, which got listed on the stock exchange last year, had a rough landing with its stock crashing 27.25 per cent, the biggest-ever fall in a decade for any scrip on listing day.  

There is increasing competition in digital lending, with aggregators, NBFCs, banks, fintech firms and others joining it.