Paytm Payments Bank Posts Maiden Profit In FY19

Paytm Payments Bank has reported a net profit of Rs 19 crore for 2018-19 as against a net loss of Rs 51 crore in the previous year, the company said in a statement on Thursday. As of April 2019, the company had more than Rs 500 crore in savings account deposits, making it the largest payments bank, the company said.

Paytm is the first payments bank in the country to announce a profit, said Satish Kumar Gupta, chief executive officer of Paytm Payments Bank in a statement. Gupta added that the company aims to introduce more products and features on the platform to increase the monthly processing of savings account payments from Rs 24,000 crores to Rs 40,000 crores in 2019-20..

BloombergQuint could not independently verify the numbers provided by the company as it is not a listed entity. Company officials were not available for further comment.

Payment banks were introduced by the Reserve Bank of India in 2015 and the first such entity became operational in 2017.

At present there are seven payment banks operating in India. As of December 2018, these entities had mobilised around Rs 780 crore in deposits, spread across savings and current accounts, shows RBI data accessed by BloombergQuint via a Right To Information request. This is an increase of 77.5 percent over the Rs 440 crore in deposits held by these banks in March 2018, the data showed. More recent data until March 2019 was not available with the RBI.

While deposit accretion has picked up, profitability remains a challenge due to restrictions on lending. In 2017-18, payments banks reported collective losses of Rs 516.5 crore, showed data included by the RBI in its ‘Trends and Progress In Banking’ report released in December 2018. Data for 2018-19 is not available.

Information put out by Paytm payments bank on Thursday suggests some stability in operations and profitability at least for them. This has come on the back of increased volume of transactions.

Paytm payments bank leads mobile banking transactions with over 19 percent market share, said the company’s statement. It added that it has a market share of nearly 32 percent for UPI transactions and about 19 percent for mobile banking.