What's bringing Amit Singhal and Vijay Shekhar Sharma together?
Update: It's confirmed — ex-Google Search Head Amit Singhal (48) will be joining the board of Paytm as an additional director. Bringing to the table his technical competence, he will help the company deliver their financial products.
On Thursday, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of internet payments giant Paytm, took to social media, sharing a clip of Amit Singhal, ex-head of Google’s search across desktop, mobile and other search appliances.
The tweet was captioned “Getting ready for announcing something new and big.”
In May, it was reported that Paytm, one of the 11 recipients of a payments bank licence, will start the bank with an initial capital of Rs 300 crore before November this year.
While speaking to YourStory earlier, Paytm Payments Bank CEO Shinjini Kumar had said,
"We’re still progressing with all the three work streams. One is regulatory approvals, which is not yet done and is still under process. The second is technology integration. The whole app development is ours, data analytics as well. Third is the exciting part. This is where we travel and search for people who would like to partner with us as we journey. It’s the whole business and product development part. So, there’s work going on in all three processes simultaneously, and hopefully, we’ll go live before Diwali.”
With three players already having withdrawn their applications, Paytm seems to be gung-ho about making a profitable business from the same.
Further, according to Vijay, the company, One97 Communications, will continue to fund the bank till it is profitable. The payments bank is owned 51 percent by One97 communications, with Vijay in control of the other 49 percent.
The clip encapsulated the following conversation between Vijay and Amit:
Amit: … and it won’t happen unless you make money digitally.
VSS: Absolutely, digital will make the people potential candidates to receive this credit.
Amit: And basically, I can just see that all human beings require help at some point or the other and there are various human beings with tremendous potential and this potential is not known to the world, because there is no transaction history.
Amit, who retired from his position at Google in February, had picked ESOPs at the payments company the same month. Other industry stalwarts who have done the same include WhatsApp’s Neeraj Arora and Facebook’s Ruchi Sanghvi, according to The Economic Times.
Though these developments give way to some interesting conversations about Amit’s advisory role at Paytm, the duo seems rather excited about the launch they’re gearing up for.
