Paytm clocks 449 pc growth in loans disbursal

Fintech startup Paytm on Monday announced it has disbursed 26.4 lakh loans in April, clocking a year-on-year (YoY) growth of 449 percent, as compared with 4.8 lakh in the same month last year. 

The platform's lending business now has an annualised run-rate of Rs 20,000 crore of disbursements while device deployment crossed the 3-million mark, the company said in an exchange filing. 

In its performance updates for April 2022, One97 Communications, the parent company of Paytm, said the value of loans disbursed stood at a total of Rs 1,657 crore ($221 million), a YoY growth of 749 percent from last year.

“We are also seeing increases in average ticket size due to the scale-up of the personal loans business in particular,” it added. 

The disclosures, filed on Sunday evening, come five days ahead of a board meeting to consider and approve the company's audited financial results for the fourth quarter of FY 2022 on May 20.  

The total loans disbursed by financial institution partners/lenders through Paytm include both consumer loans and merchant loans, but excludes the number and the value of loans sourced by third parties through advertising on Paytm, and aggregation of EMIs on swipe card machines.

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Merchant payments 

In April, Paytm is said to have deployed 3.2 million devices in stores, with an average rate of 300,000 deployments per month. 

Maintaining a stronghold in the offline payment business, the total merchant GMV (gross merchandise value) processed through Paytm’s platform during April 2022 aggregated to approximately Rs 0.95 lakh crore ($12.7 billion), marking a year-on-year growth of 102 percent. Paytm’s monthly transacting users stood at 73.5 million.

“We expect this growth to contribute to a rise in the number of merchants eligible for loans,” it said. 

Last month, the company’s Founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma in a shareholder letter said that the company will achieve operating EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) breakeven in the next six quarters.

Paytm said that the monthly transacting users (MTU) of its super app—aggregating all services including bill payments, ticket purchase and vaccine slot booking—grew 44 percent YoY to 73.5 million in April 2022. 

Its shares on Monday stood at Rs 559.15, up by 2.95 percent on BSE at 12:34 pm.

In March 2022, Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led Paytm Payments Bank was ordered to halt onboarding new clients with immediate effect by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), until it gives the go-ahead after an audit by an information technology expert.