Paytm to launch stock-broking services soon

Paytm had received the approval for brokerage services from market regulator Sebi in January this year.

After getting into insurance, e-commerce and banking sectors, fintech unicorn Paytm is all set to dabble into stock-broking services in the next few weeks.

“Payments is the largest revenue for us and a couple of million-dollar revenues comes from that standalone, and then we are industry number two in terms of ticketing and events business and distant number three in e-commerce," said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO of the Alibaba-backed firm.

"We then started to build our financial services stack with banking and we hope to do lending.

"We are good in mutual funds and we hope to do stock brokerage which is expected to launch in the next 2-3 weeks," he said while speaking at the Global Fintech Fest virtually.

Paytm had received the approval for brokerage services from market regulator Securities Exchange Board of India (Sebi) in January this year.

Sharma said getting a capital source to expand its lending business in the long run is the reason why it purchased insurance firm Raheja QBE earlier this month.

"If we were to be a large company after 15 years, we should be an incredible insurer.

"The biggest amounts are held with the insurance companies. In India, Life Insurance Corporation acts as a rescue machine whenever there is capital required or, globally, Berkshire Hathaway to AIA hold large pools of capital available to be deployed," he added.

"People question us for our choices of recharge, payments bank and insurances businesses.

"I look at Paytm as a 10-20-year horizon business and not like a business where we have to flip the cart," he said in a fireside chat with Rajan Anandan, managing director, Sequoia Capital India.

Paytm and Sharma together acquired Raheja QBE General Insurance for nearly Rs 568 crore earlier this month.

The Covid-19 has also led to higher transaction volumes for the company.

"An average active Paytm user is doing 2.5 times to 3.5 times more transactions now and they are doing two transactions a week on the platform on an average," he added.

Photograph: PTI Photo