One97 Communications Limited, the parent company of the brand Paytm, on Monday filed its annual report for 2022-23 with the exchanges. The company’s founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma has also written a letter to shareholders.
In his letter to shareholders, Sharma mentioned that for India’s Digital revolution after mobile payments, Paytm’s next contribution will be – small mobile credit with high credit quality and fully compliant with the regulators guidelines.
“Expectedly this requires sophisticated capabilities in AI and other technologies. I am very proud of our Advanced AI capabilities in use and how we are expanding. We are building an India scale AI system which will help various financial institutes in capturing possible risks and frauds, while also protecting them from new kinds of risks due to advancement in AI,” he wrote.
He further mentioned that Paytm is investing in AI with an eye on building Artificial General Intelligence software stack. “We believe by building it in India we are not only making our country’s tech capability, also creating something that could be leveraged outside India,” he wrote.
Furthermore, in the letter, Sharma also spoke about Paytm pioneered mobile payments in India and led mass adoption with innovations like QR Codes and Soundbox.
“In India, we can expect 500 million payment consumers and 100 million merchants not very far in future. This is made possible by Paytm leading from the front, our government’s agenda to drive Digital India and the regulator’s encouragement to build an open scalable payment system. We are not only beneficiaries but also the biggest champions of government and regulator driven Digital Public Infrastructure,” he wrote.
Reportedly, Paytm reported a 61% rise in revenue from operations to INR 7,990 crore for FY23. Its Ebitda before ESOP costs stood at a negative INR 176 crore for the year. Earlier this year, Paytm achieved its operating profitability milestone in Q3 FY23, ahead of Sharma’s September 2023 quarter guidance.
In its annual report, the company said that this performance was driven by sustained growth in revenue on account of platform expansion and increased monetisation, better profitability in the payments business as well as increased contribution of high growth, high margin businesses such as loan distribution and disciplined cost management.
Source: Entrepreneur
