To say that Vijay Shekhar Sharma is ambitious is an understatement. The founder of Paytm, India's largest digital payments company, has already revolutionized the way 400 million people spend money — whether it's buying dinner, paying an electric bill or sending money to a friend.
Over the course of his career, he's also ventured into online retail, banking and even gaming.
But he's not done yet. Sharma wants to bring at least half a billion Indians into the banking system through Paytm's app. He also wants to put Paytm on the global map alongside the Googles and Facebooks of the world.
His business philosophy is fuelled by a phrase that echoes throughout Paytm's office in Noida, an industrial hub on the outskirts of New Delhi: "Go Big or Go Home." The concept is driven home on a frosted glass wall of Paytm's main boardroom, on office stationery and on countless coffee mugs in its pantry.
It's an outlook that has helped Sharma, 41, grow Paytm into a company valued at $15 billion in less than a decade.
But with that growth comes the risk of doing too much too fast.
Paytm is fighting battles with deep-pocketed rivals on several fronts, and losing those battles could mean missing a huge opportunity. India already has more than 600 million internet users, but, crucially, there are nearly 800 million Indians yet to go online for the first time.
Sharma has a sizeable war chest of his own, thanks to investors like Chinese tech giant Alibaba, Japanese behemoth SoftBank and Warren Buffett. But even so, Paytm is dwarfed by the companies it is trying to fend off — Google, Facebook, Amazon and Walmart— all of which have already spent billions of dollars trying to get a piece of the action in India.
That hasn't stopped Sharma from wanting to take the fight to them. He has started a push to take Paytm global, with all roads leading to the United States and a battle with a fresh set of competitors including Venmo, Square and Apple Pay.
Paytm's headquarters in Noida, India. (Saurabh Das for CNN)
A decade of driving digital payments
In India, Paytm is best known as a one-stop shop for digital payments. You can use it to send money to a friend, like Venmo, or to pay for anything from bus tickets to utility bills using your smartphone.
Millions of shopkeepers across India also now accept Paytm, prominently displaying QR codes that can be scanned with the phone's camera to pay for purchases.
"What we've changed in this country is that now you don't need to actually carry a wallet, or a card, or a currency," Sharma told CNN Business.
Paytm's journey began back in 2000, when Sharma founded its parent company, One97 Communications. One97 started as a mobile services platform offering horoscopes to cellular network providers before expanding into other services like voice-based gaming and customized ringtones.
Paytm came a decade later, launched in 2010 as a platform for buying prepaid cellphone plans and paying cable bills online.
"Vijay was at an interesting crossroads. He was the majority shareholder in One97... the company was growing well and very profitable," said Ravi Adusumalli, a managing partner at private equity firm SAIF Partners and One97's first institutional investor.
"He could have easily sold the company and retired, or he could invest 100% of his net worth into creating a new company," added Adusumalli, who serves on One97's board of directors. "He clearly made the right choice, but it wasn't obvious at the time."
The One97 board wasn't convinced Sharma should invest aggressively in a consumer business, since all of its previous endeavors had been B2B. India's smartphone boom had yet to take off, and the country had fewer than 140 million internet users. But Adusumalli said the board compromised and gave Sharma a small amount of money to invest and see how it went. Sharma also put in $2 million of his own money to get Paytm off the ground.
"When the results came back positive, my recommendation was to 'go big or go home,'" said Adusumalli. "Trying to do something incremental would lead to certain failure, so he needed to decide whether he wanted to risk One97 for Paytm."
It was Sharma's first big risk. Had Paytm failed to take off in the way it did, it could have doomed the company he'd spent a decade building. Missing the boat on India's internet boom would have been difficult to recover from.
The milestones for Sharma have kept coming. In 2012, Paytm got approval from India's central bank to launch the mobile wallet that now forms the core of its business. In 2014, it partnered with Uber to become a payment option for the company's cab rides across India, and in 2015 it snagged another big partnership with the online booking portal for Indian Railways, which sells nearly 700,000 tickets a day and 25 million tickets a year.
But the app really exploded in November 2016, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi suddenly banned the country's two biggest currency notes — around 86% of the country's cash at the time — with the aim of cracking down on tax evasion and illegal wealth.
The move shocked India's economy, where vast the majority of transactions are made in cash. Millions of people spent weeks lining up at ATMs to exchange their currency notes just so they would have enough money for everyday expenses.
People rushed to withdraw cash from ATMs after the government banned two of India's biggest currency notes in 2016. (Sanjeev Verma/Hindustan Times/Getty Images)
But those who had smartphones started switching to mobile payment apps, and Paytm was primed and ready. The app signed 10 million new users within a month of the cash ban, going from adding tens of thousands of people a day to around half a million.
The cash ban "made us a folklore name in this country," Sharma said. And while its rate of growth is no longer as rapid as it was back then, Paytm has more than doubled its user base in the last two and a half years to 400 million.
Paytm's growth is reflected in digital payments overall as well. The average number of cashless payments per person per year in India has gone from 2.4 to 22.4 in the last five years, according to a report commissioned by the country's central bank published in May.
But cash still rules. Despite the growth of digital payments, the value of currency in circulation increased by 17% to more than 21 trillion rupees ($296 billion) in the past financial year, according to the central bank. That's around ten times the value of mobile payment transactions over the same period.
"India remains a largely cash-driven economy. Economic growth has been possible through many transactions that are done primarily in cash," the report said.
"The biggest challenge that we face comes from customers' ability or intent to pay digitally," Sharma said. "Paytm and the mobile payment has taken off, but still there is a huge amount of resistance."
Driven by ambition
Sharma grew up in Aligarh, a small town about 100 miles south of India's capital, New Delhi. He finished high school by the time he was 14 and graduated from the Delhi College of Engineering at age 19, according to a blog post on Paytm's website.
But Sharma didn't speak much English and struggled to understand what was being taught in class. He got through college by reading two versions of the textbooks — one in English and the other in his native Hindi. He would also spend a lot of time in the college computer lab, according to the blog post, "browsing the internet and dreaming about being in Silicon Valley."
By the time he graduated, Sharma had taught himself to code and already had his first startup under his belt. He cofounded a company called XS Communications that made content management systems used by several major Indian publications. The company was sold to a US entrepreneur for $1 million in 1999.
SOURCE; CNN
