Vijay Shekhar Sharma on Fintech Regulation

Vijay Shekhar Sharma founded One97 Communications and built Paytm into India's largest payments brand by transaction volume, a trajectory defined by the demonetisation-led surge of 2016 and then sharply tested by the Reserve Bank of India's 2022 restrictions on Paytm Payments Bank.

The operational rescue — migrating the wallet user base and merchant network to a third-party arrangement with third-party banks — preserved the brand's transaction surface while conceding the strategic loss of the captive balance-sheet the payments bank had provided.

The RBI's directive that Paytm Payments Bank stop accepting fresh deposits from end-January 2024, after persistent compliance failures around know-your-customer and related-party transactions, effectively forced the unwinding of the entity that had anchored the group's payments moat.

The episode is read as the clearest Indian case of regulatory risk attaching directly to a payments-bank structure, illustrating that the regulatory licence itself is a contingent asset whose loss can compress a firm's enterprise value faster than any competitive event.