Financial services business Paytm Money raises Rs 9 Cr from parent One97 Communications

One97 Communications, the parent of Paytm, pumped in Rs 9 crore in its financial services business Paytm Money, last month, according to filings with the Registrar of Companies (RoC).

While not disclosing the absolute figures, Pravin Jadhav, Senior Vice President at Paytm, who is leading the new venture, said One97 Communications is the sole promoter of Paytm Money. He had earlier stated that the internal investment commitment put in the project is extremely high.

Earlier this month, Paytm Money had announced it had received official approval of the capital markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to become a registered Investment Advisor. This license will allow the company to roll out investment and wealth management products.

At that time, Paytm Money had stated that the platform was planning a limited rollout of investment products starting with direct plan mutual funds investments with zero commissions.

In the future, the company will also have a separate app, available on both Android and iOS. At present, allows users to sign up for early access by logging on to the website www.paytmmoney.com.

In January, the Pravin said that the size of the team was close to 40 members then. However, the company had plans to scaling this number to 200 employees in the next four to six months.

At present, Paytm sees financial services as one of the promising verticals of expansion, considering the industry continues to be in a nascent stage. Further, unlike its other categories and verticals, Paytm would not have to invest in cash backs for luring more customers to the platform.

However, this doesn’t take away the cost of marketing and educating the customer.

Paytm is not the only player aggressively looking at this market. Flipkart-owned PhonePe has also revealed its plans to set up a different business unit for financial services.