Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma is confident of being PAT profitable in some quarters, and said the year 2025 will hopefully be about the turnaround of the company.
In conversation with CNBC-TV18 on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Vijay Shekhar Sharma said on January 21 that his fintech company will look to win back customers with better services as well as the brand recall. "I can say that even though we've fallen in the UPI market share, it is easily recoverable," Paytm founder said. The company is banking on deeper integration into the UPI ecosystem as well as more merchant acquisitions to bring back its consumers.
Paytm is also looking to have 'its own play' in the AI sphere, which Sharma said will be a gamechanger for India's economy. The management has managed to bring down its engineering cost by adding a lot of AI features into the app, said Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
The fintech's payment aggregator licence application has also been refiled, and the regulatory process is underway. Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said the big learning of the past couple of years is that the company now looks at the compliance aspect of all its features more closely. "It is a compliance first approach, versus a tech or consumer first approach," said Sharma, highlighting that the company has ingrained the compliance role, instead of just having a single compliance officer to look into the aspect.
Read More: Explainer - What is behind the race for payment aggregator licences?
Sharma added that he is not unduly worried about the loss of UPI market share, as the company's revenue is driven by only 6-7 lakh users that avail its services. The company will chase profit without worrying about the UPI market share, he said. "We have a huge customer base that has stayed with us, and which is very big. We should just continue to monetise them," said Vijay Shekhar Sharma. "At the same time, we would not leave UPI market share on the plate that is there to be taken."
Sharma said the company is hopeful that 2025 will see the turnaround that the company has been working towards.
Earlier this month, National Payments Corporation of India has extended the cap on volumes processed by Unified Payments Interface (UPI) applications by two more years to December 2026, a move that benefits Google Pay and Walmart-backed PhonePe.
After the December quarter results, a Citi note too said that the company appears on track to achieve adjusted EBITDA break-even, excluding UPI incentives, in the March quarter. Paytm had on January 20 said that its net loss for the December quarter narrowed to Rs 208 crore, compared to Rs 220 crore in the same period last year.
Paytm, through its subsidiary Paytm Cloud Tech, had on January 20 announced that it will be setting up businesses in UAE, Saudi Arabia and Singapore to leverage its tech-enabled merchant payments and financial services in 'similar' international markets, and seek local licenses and partnerships.
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