Architect Of UPI From NPCI Joins Paytm: Big Boost For Paytm’s UPI Ambitions?

Paytm Payments Bank has roped in Anubhav Sharma who was heading Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Immediate Payment Service at the National Payments Corporations of India (NPCI) for a top role at the bank, said two sources with a know in the matter.

Read on to know more..

New Recruitment at Paytm Payments Bank!

This recruitment would be one of the most senior hirings for the Paytm Payments bank which has faced exits of top-level executives from its group companies in payments, mutual fund and gaming in the past 3-4 months.

“The appointment of Sharma has been finalised and Paytm Payments Bank is likely to announce it soon. The firm would leverage his years of experience in digital payments to ramp up its UPI-based payments system and payments bank,” said one of the above mentioned sources on condition of anonymity.

The sources also confirmed that Sharma has already left NPCI. However, his exact role at Paytm Payments Bank is not yet known.

The new development comes at the time when its subsidiaries have been struggling with the exit of senior executives. Paytm’s online payment business lead Puneet Jain, Paytm First’s head Siddharth Pandey and Paytm Mall’s CFO Rudra Dalmia had recently put in their papers.

Earlier, Pravin Jadhav, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Paytm’s mutual fund arm Paytm Money, had also quit the company. 

Around the same time, its Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Suresh Vasudevan and operations head Beejish Pillai also resigned from the Bengaluru-headquartered firm.

Amidst the departure of senior level executives, Paytm has also been hiring across levels. According to an Inc42 report, the firm has hired around 20 people in leadership roles including Kapil Goswami, Vineet Arora, Manmeet Dhody and Tejinder Singh.

Paytm UPI Transaction Volume Low!

Paytm’s monthly UPI transactions volume stood at 12.4 crore against Google Pay’s 54.1 crore and PhonePe’s 44.4 crore in May, 2020. 

The SoftBank-backed firm also recorded a fall in the number of users transacting on the platform to 3 crore. In comparison, Google Pay and PhonePe’s transacting users were recorded at 7.5 crore and 6 crore respectively.

The second source on the condition of anonymity pointed out that Sharma’s appointment will bolster Paytm’s UPI as it has been lagging behind Google Pay and PhonePe in terms of processing number of transactions since October 2019. 

What would be the role of UPI head of NPCI at Paytm?

During his over 8 ½ years tenure at NPCI, Sharma has headed UPI/IMPS and has product management experience in NFS ATMs, IMPS, Prepaid Instruments (PPI) Business and UPI.

Given that Paytm has reduced its dependency on UPI to focus on banking services that include wallet, IMPS, NEFT and RTGS, Sharma is most likely to look after digital payments for the Noida-based bank. 

The source also said, “While shifting the focus to banking is not surprising, the fall in the number of users is worrisome.”

Does this mean Paytm’s UPI figures will get a boost in the coming days?