He revolutionized how millions of people spend money in India. His next target: America

[Beardman]

Story by Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business
Video by Richa Naik, Tawanda Scott Sambou and Janelle Gonzalez, CNN Business
Photo illustrations by Ken Fowler

Updated 8:39 PM ET, Wed October 23, 2019

 

To say that Vijay Shekhar Sharma is ambitious is an understatement. The founder of Paytm, India's largest digital payments company, has already revolutionized the way 400 million people spend money — whether it's buying dinner, paying an electric bill or sending money to a friend.

Over the course of his career, he's also ventured into online retail, banking and even gaming.

But he's not done yet. Sharma wants to bring at least half a billion Indians into the banking system through Paytm's app. He also wants to put Paytm on the global map alongside the Googles and Facebooks of the world.

His business philosophy is fuelled by a phrase that echoes throughout Paytm's office in Noida, an industrial hub on the outskirts of New Delhi: "Go Big or Go Home." The concept is driven home on a frosted glass wall of Paytm's main boardroom, on office stationery and on countless coffee mugs in its pantry.

It's an outlook that has helped Sharma, 41, grow Paytm into a company valued at $15 billion in less than a decade.

But with that growth comes the risk of doing too much too fast.

 

Vijay Shekhar Sharma built digital payments company Paytm, which now boasts more than 400 million users in India. (Saurabh Das for CNN)

Paytm is fighting battles with deep-pocketed rivals on several fronts, and losing those battles could mean missing a huge opportunity. India already has more than 600 million internet users, but, crucially, there are nearly 800 million Indians yet to go online for the first time.

 

Related: See the 20 Risk Takers pushing global business forward

 

Sharma has a sizeable war chest of his own, thanks to investors like Chinese tech giant Alibaba, Japanese behemoth SoftBank and Warren Buffett. But even so, Paytm is dwarfed by the companies it is trying to fend off — Google, Facebook, Amazon and Walmart— all of which have already spent billions of dollars trying to get a piece of the action in India.

That hasn't stopped Sharma from wanting to take the fight to them. He has started a push to take Paytm global, with all roads leading to the United States and a battle with a fresh set of competitors including Venmo, Square and Apple Pay.

 

Paytm's headquarters in Noida, India. (Saurabh Das for CNN)

A decade of driving digital payments

In India, Paytm is best known as a one-stop shop for digital payments. You can use it to send money to a friend, like Venmo, or to pay for anything from bus tickets to utility bills using your smartphone.

Millions of shopkeepers across India also now accept Paytm, prominently displaying QR codes that can be scanned with the phone's camera to pay for purchases.

"What we've changed in this country is that now you don't need to actually carry a wallet, or a card, or a currency," Sharma told CNN Business.

Paytm's journey began back in 2000, when Sharma founded its parent company, One97 Communications. One97 started as a mobile services platform offering horoscopes to cellular network providers before expanding into other services like voice-based gaming and customized ringtones.

Paytm came a decade later, launched in 2010 as a platform for buying prepaid cellphone plans and paying cable bills online.

 

"Vijay was at an interesting crossroads. He was the majority shareholder in One97... the company was growing well and very profitable," said Ravi Adusumalli, a managing partner at private equity firm SAIF Partners and One97's first institutional investor.

"He could have easily sold the company and retired, or he could invest 100% of his net worth into creating a new company," added Adusumalli, who serves on One97's board of directors. "He clearly made the right choice, but it wasn't obvious at the time."

What we've changed in this country is that now you don't need to actually carry a wallet, or a card, or a currency."

VIJAY SHEKHAR SHARMA, FOUNDER OF PAYTM

The One97 board wasn't convinced Sharma should invest aggressively in a consumer business, since all of its previous endeavors had been B2B. India's smartphone boom had yet to take off, and the country had fewer than 140 million internet users. But Adusumalli said the board compromised and gave Sharma a small amount of money to invest and see how it went. Sharma also put in $2 million of his own money to get Paytm off the ground.

"When the results came back positive, my recommendation was to 'go big or go home,'" said Adusumalli. "Trying to do something incremental would lead to certain failure, so he needed to decide whether he wanted to risk One97 for Paytm."

It was Sharma's first big risk. Had Paytm failed to take off in the way it did, it could have doomed the company he'd spent a decade building. Missing the boat on India's internet boom would have been difficult to recover from.

The milestones for Sharma have kept coming. In 2012, Paytm got approval from India's central bank to launch the mobile wallet that now forms the core of its business. In 2014, it partnered with Uber to become a payment option for the company's cab rides across India, and in 2015 it snagged another big partnership with the online booking portal for Indian Railways, which sells nearly 700,000 tickets a day and 25 million tickets a year.

But the app really exploded in November 2016, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi suddenly banned the country's two biggest currency notes — around 86% of the country's cash at the time — with the aim of cracking down on tax evasion and illegal wealth.

The move shocked India's economy, where vast the majority of transactions are made in cash. Millions of people spent weeks lining up at ATMs to exchange their currency notes just so they would have enough money for everyday expenses.

[sureshkonda]

Already atlanti apps America lo unnayi man. Bofa,chase,dcu lo bill pay system undi.

[Peddayana]

Ikkada fintech space is very crowed , lets see 

[Sachin200]

PayPal tho compete avutada??

[Spartan]

hell lot of apps here already...

banks themselves provide..and 3rd party as well like Venmo...

[Athadu007]

2 minutes ago, Spartan said:

hell lot of apps here already...

banks themselves provide..and 3rd party as well like Venmo...

But toll gate dagara e app tho pay chestharu?

[kothavani]

He is having tough time with google pay and phone pe in india , no way he can succeed in USA 

His achivement is great correct time lo when moddiii tatha banned notes it came into lime light

 

Paypal already roots varaki elipoyindi, amazon pay, Apple Pay , Google Pay ( Both apple and google are device specific with network tokenization inside) , Amazzon pay , Micorsoft poay

 

Already all the four payment networks visa , mstr , amnex and disover are coming withe secure remote commerce click to pay

 

https://www.paymentssource.com/news/more-than-a-buy-button-how-card-brands-are-building-the-future-of-payments?feed=00000157-2a61-dceb-aff7-bf63c61c0000

 

At Rs 3,960 crore, losses mount 165% for Paytm parent One97

Paytm’s parent One97 Communications posted Rs 3,959.6 crore in net losses for the fiscal year.

By 

Pratik Bhakta

, ET Bureau|

 

 

Paytm’s losses widened 165% in the last financial year while revenue increased marginally, at a time when the digital payments leader faces increased competition from Google Pay and PhonePe.

Paytm’s parent One97 Communications posted Rs 3,959.6 crore in net losses for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2019 against Rs 1,490 crore for the same period in the previous year, according to details released by the company that were shared with shareholders.

The company’s standalone reve ..
 

Read more at:
//economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/71054159.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst