Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm, Founder was present as an esteemed at the Women Economic Forum 2017, held at Pullman, Aerocity, New Delhi on 8th May.
He spoke about ‘financial payment sector’ as a whole and his upcoming stint with Paytm Payment bank.
BW Businessworld’s Soumya Gupta, interacted with Vijay Shekhar Sharma to know what lies ahead in the financial payment sector and what one can expect?
Sharma said, First of all I would say that it’s not easy to make a dream come true or becoming a revolutionary brand. And everybody runs out of resources, irrespective of who he is, how big is he and whatever he plans to do. When we acquire an extent of money, the desired amount moves to a next level, even farther.”
On the note of Bitcoins and promoting their use in India, he replied. “We are a legitimately licensed payment provider and we can launch the currency where we have the financial consent, but at the same time we are not into lending bitcoins as of now. A bitcoin purchasing cannot be done unless the financial regulator of India and the RBI allows.
He quirkily joked about Whatsapp Pay saying, “Now whatsapp has not done any payment yet! I can’t logically comment on that till it’s not out.”
On the payment bank front he said, “Primarily, the plan is not to to create differentiation from one another, it’s a distribution differentiation; it’s creating a different kind of experience, through phones. Transaction would be seamless and thus, if you think, we’ll offer very high interest rates, or a different kind of payment interface, it’s an illusion, it’s just the same thing.
On being enquired, why players are backing off from the sector, what makes them take their announcement back and return the licenses, Sharma said, “The league of 11 players had taken the pledge to offer financial services through payment banks, but I don’t think the market expertise or research shows it is lucrative for all of them. But if you ask me, we want to offer all sorts of financial services and that is why we continue to have a very high interest in banks.
Another space he find rather compelling to invest is
O2O commerce, as offline commerce continues to expand like ticketing business is a big area where he would like to explore some more opportunities. His most recent personal investment has gone to the startup NoBroker.com, where he invested an undisclosed amount of funding. The P2P (peer-to-peer) listing portal/startup for renting homes received the investment in November 2016.
BW Reporters
Soumya is a young writer and journalist, with bachelors in Multimedia and Mass Communication. She is an alumini of the Asian College of Journalism, and finds politics and sustainability intriguing beats to work with.
