BENGALURU: Digital payments and commerce platform Paytm’s founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma has sold 1% of his holding in One97 Communications to raise about Rs 325 crore. This money will be pumped into the group’s proposed payments bank. Sharma has sold the stake to one of the shareholders of One97 Communications, the company that runs Paytm. The shareholder’s name was not disclosed.
“We completed the transaction last week,” Sharma told TOI. According to documents filed with RoC (Registrar of Companies), Sharma had a 21.33% stake in One97 Communications as of March 2016. The latest transaction reduces that stake to 20.33%. The transaction values One97 Communications at about $4.7 billion.
Sharma has received in-principle approval from the Reserve Bank of India to start the payments bank but the final approval is awaited. According to RBI rules, Sharma has to hold a 51% stake in the payments bank for which he has created a new entity–Paytm Payments Bank. The commerce marketplace has been housed under another new entity called Paytm E-commerce Private.
TOI had on December 5 reported that the company decided to transfer the wallet business to the payments bank entity , a mandatory step to fulfill the rules laid out by the RBI. The transfer will be complete once the payment bank license is received. Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba and its affiliate payments major Alipay together own 40.94% stake in One97 Communications, which has raised concerns about the Chinese company having access to crucial financial data of Indians.
Sharma said Alibaba would not have any direct ownership in the proposed payments bank. He said the company plans an independent board for the bank. Telecom major AirtelBSE 0.20 % has already launched a payments bank.
The Noida-based company is also in the middle of a fresh fund raise. Of the targetted $250-300 million, $60 million has already come from Taiwan’s Mediatek. Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said the company has given approval for hiring 20,000 sales people to reach consumers in more than 650 districts. The company has received a huge leg up since demonetization and the subsequent push from the government to create quickly a stronger and broader digital payments infrastructure.
Paytm has 11,000 employees now, of which 1,500 were added in just the past one month after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the withdrawal of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. The company , which has 88 million active users according to app data tracker AppAnnie, has seen mobile wallet adoption increase sharply in this period.
“Our hiring is limited only by the capacity of our human resources bandwidth to hire people. We are looking at a 10-member sales team for each of the districts. We are also working with Niti Aayog to increase awareness across the country,” Sharma said.
The company says the introduction of payments for feature phones has seen an adoption of wallets by merchants and small towns rise dramatically. Any Paytm user without an internet connection can now dial a toll-free number to make a payment. “We increased our capacity to handle calls to around 1,300 per second after our lines went busy on the first day we launched the service. We underestimated the users who will use Paytm on feature phones. We expect around half of our customers will come from feature phones in a few years,” Sharma said.
