‘Paytm is clearly ahead of Google Pay and Phonepe’

Infosys co-founder and Aadhaar architect Nandan Nilekani says Paytm founder and Chief Executive VIJAY SHEKHAR SHARMA is “democratising digital payments in the country and nobody has done a better job than him.” Nilekani also threw a challenge to Sharma to build Aadhaar-enabled payments system and allow Paytm to work on feature phones. In an interview with Peerzada Abrar & Yuvraj Malik, Sharma says when it comes to paying merchants, Paytm clearly dominates the market share. Edited excerpts:

At what stage has India leapfrogged in the fintech sector and have we gone beyond the Whatsapp moment in the financial sector?

I think it is ubiquitous and everybody understands what it can do. People have their concerns if they are not on board yet as digital payment consumers or merchants. As far as the large cities are concerned, the penetration is incredibly big. I understand that people don’t use it too often every day, but that will happen once the penetration of merchants becomes even deeper. So, right now, with 10-15 million merchants, at Paytm, we still believe that we could have done another 15 million. There are people like street hawkers and auto-rickshaw drivers who are not even accounted for as small and medium enterprises.

Talking about the banking industry, start-ups in the fintech space, including players such as Paytm, are disrupting the financial services and banking industry. Are banks right to be afraid of the fintech boom in the country?

I always believe that we don’t need to disrupt the financial services or banking industry, we need to add to their capabilities. What SBI, HDFC or ICICI have done is phenomenal. What Paytm or Paytm Bank has to do is to serve another set of users. And, that is exactly where we will focus on. In other words, we believe that it is not imperative for us to grow so that somebody else needs to be disrupted.

How do you view competition from players such as Google Pay, Phonepe and Amazon Pay? How do you see Paytm differentiating itself when compared to them in the next few years?

I think when it comes to paying a merchant, Paytm clearly, as the data shows, dominates the market share. Paytm is bigger than everybody else combined in the market. When it comes to person-to-person money transfer, it is not economic transactional value.