Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder and CEO of Paytm, is IMPACT Person of the Year 2016 for being a disruptor and innovator in India’s digital ecosystem, a pioneer in financial technology and visionary entrepreneur
The rise and rise of Vijay Shekhar Sharma has been meteoric, from a boy born in a lower middle class family in Aligarh, to an engineering student who was bright but struggled to follow lectures in English, to founder and CEO of Paytm, one of the most formidable unicorns on India’s start-up scene. It has been an inspiring journey indeed for VSS, as he is known. At one time, he survived on Rs 10 a day, lived modestly in Delhi and walked miles as he could not afford the bus fare. In the midst of all the hardship, he dreamt big. Today, he is living that dream.
From his very early days, Sharma realized his entrepreneurial streak. He ventured into his first business One97, in 2000. Amidst a lot of ups and downs in the aftermath of the 9/11 incident, he held on to the company he had created, steering it through a rough patch. In 2010, he started another company named Paytm. After 11 odd years of toil, his company was valued at around $300 million in 2012. Prior to that, he had the opportunity to work with River Run Software group as a business developer as well as Intersolution India Pvt Ltd in their tech team. After only two years of experience, he moved ahead to join the India Today Group Online as their Tech head. Excelling in the field, he went on to preside as CTO at Startec Global Systems India. He climbed the ladder of professional growth with significant contributions towards all the companies he has been associated with.
Paytm is arguably India’s largest mobile payments and commerce platform today, while its parent company, One97 Communications, is valued at approximately $4.7 billion, after Sharma recently sold 1% stock to raise Rs 325 crore. The company’s investors include Ant Financials (Alipay), the Alibaba Group, Mediatek, SAIF Partners, Sapphire Venture and Silicon Valley Bank.
Meanwhile, Sharma himself is an investor in start-ups like GOQii, Applied Life, InnerChef, DealStreet Asia and Intelligent Interfaces, and recently pledged a Rs 10 crore fund to build a network of start-ups that are working towards environmental sustainability in India.
PAYTM KARO!
Paytm is one of the biggest advertisers in the industry today. In June this year, it launched a Rs 50-crore advertising campaign across TV, Print, Radio and social media for its mobile payment app, and post the demonetization announcement, there has been massive and aggressive advertising across media platforms. Media reports say the company will spend Rs 600 crore on branding and marketing in 2016-17. The company’s ad spends amounted to more than Rs 500 crore in 2015-16. Some notable Paytm ads are – ‘ATM nahi, Paytm karo’, ‘Chinta mat karo, Paytm karo’, ‘Chhutte ki chinta mat karo, Paytm karo’ and ‘Apni Gullak ka Cash save karo, Paytm karo’. While McCann WorldGroup is the creative agency that churns out Paytm’s ads, Maxus is the media agency on record.
Sharma has been at the forefront of India’s cashless revolution, anticipating it much before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for demonetization (He had launched the Paytm wallet in 2014). When Modi’s announcement came on November 8, 2016, it proved to be a windfall for Sharma, who quickly prepared Paytm to take on the upheaval that followed, going all out with advertisements in the media, adding user-friendly features and making the Paytm Android app available in 10 regional languages, to see a massive quantum of growth in a matter of days. In the next few days, Paytm registered a three-time surge in overall traffic and saw an average of five million transactions worth an annualized GMV of Rs 30,000 crore per day. It expanded its offline merchant network to more than 15,00,000 merchants, added millions of new users to its base, and saw offline contributing 65% to its overall business. For the public, it meant that they had more shops in their neighbourhood accepting Paytm than ever before.
To his team, Sharma is a man who inspires with his beliefs and persistence. Apart from setting directions for his team, he is a great innovator, and the mastermind behind the strategic development and vision-setting of his ventures.
Sharma has made Paytm a household name, and the advertising tagline ‘Paytm karo’ is synonymous with everyday digital transactions in people’s lives. Today, every roadside vendor and kirana store-owner has embraced the mobile payments and commerce platform Paytm, and for 38-year-old Sharma, that is the biggest achievement.
So far, Paytm has hit a user base of more than 160 million, and Sharma’s aim is to bring half a billion Indians on the Paytm platform by 2020. He is all set to launch a payments bank and merge his wallet business with it under a new company, Paytm Payments Bank Ltd.
Sharma has been at the forefront of India’s cashless revolution, anticipating it much before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for demonetization (He had launched the Paytm wallet in 2014). When Modi’s announcement came on November 8, 2016, it proved to be a windfall for Sharma
The young founder of Paytm finds himself not only in the national limelight, but also in the news internationally. As Paytm becomes a stronger force changing the way financial transactions take place in the Indian economy, Sharma’s work has been featured in reputed media like the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Financial Times, BBC among others.
Though its single largest shareholder is Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, Sharma affirms that Paytm goes out into the world as an Indian company and is a proud representative of the India story.
