India to have 500 million payment consumers, 100 million merchants soon: Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma

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India has an opportunity to become a net exporter of payment technology, software and hardware even as the country is expected to reach 500 million payment consumers and 100 million merchants, Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said in a letter to shareholders in its Annual Report.

"True economic GDP growth benefit of reaching the last person in the financial system will be our success. We have set our mission to enable 500 million Indians to get benefits
of mainstream economic growth. This begins by enabling them with mobile payments and helping extend various other financial services like loan, insurance etc. to them," Sharma said in the letter.

Paytm has seen its lending platform business take off helping the company reduce its losses before its earlier committed timeline of EBITDA positivity before ESOP. It has seen around Rs 15,000 crore worth of loans disbursed through its platform.

The Noida-based mobile payments firm has also seen its merchant subscription reach eight million through various payment-facilitating devices such as PoS devices and soundboxes. The soundbox announces successful UPI payments based on QR codes and has been a runaway success and has now been followed by its competitors.

Sharma also said that Paytm is investing in building Artificial General Intelligence software stack. He added that the AI system will help various financial institutes in capturing possible risks and frauds, while also protecting them from new kinds of risks due to advancement in AI.

"With a disciplined and result-oriented approach in all our selected investment areas, we are sure we will be able to capitalize and build strong differentiators in the market and in turn a business that scales efficiently without linearly adding to costs," Sharma said.

Paytm had reported close to $1 billion (almost Rs 8,000 crore) in revenue during the last financial year.