Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder of One97 Communications Ltd that runs Paytm, is looking at spinning off its marketplace business into a separate mobile app within the next three months. On Monday, he confirmed that he plans to start a bank with an initial capital of Rs. 300 crore, and this business will go to the floor before November.
The news of Paytm taking on a new entity comes at the same time when Alibaba has announced its plan to launch its operation in the country. Along with that Vijay Shekhar Sharma is hopeful that the bank will grow its business in 12 cities in the first year of its launch. Small markets of north-east and central India will be high on the agenda.
While commenting on the financial goals of the group on Business Standard, Vijay Kumar Shekhar said –
We are hopeful that we will up our transaction from Rs. 20,000 crore now to Rs. 1 lakh crore by April 2018.
Currently, the forecast looks quite promising because Paytm e-commerce marketplace gets close to two million orders a month and by 2017, it is expected to grow to five million orders. Also, out of the Rs. 20,000 crore transaction that it gets every month, 40 percent of that GMV is from the marketplace.
Vijay Kumar Sharma also recently stated that Paytm daily GMV is about Rs. 55 crore on a no-promotion basis and by 2017, it expects the GMV to touch Rs. 40,000 crore.
Also, it was recently reported that China e-commerce giant Alibaba funded an undisclosed amount to Paytm. Even though the core business of Paytm is mobile payments and mobile recharge, it has also taken its mentor Alibaba route by aggressively building its e-commerce marketplace over the past 18 months. It has started selling apparels, footwears, smartphones, laptops and other products on its site.
Currently, the Paytm marketplace has about 1,25,000 merchants, and the company expects to double it by 2017.
