Paytm Money Aims To Be India’s Top Wealth Manager

Paytm Money, the online platform for mutual fund investments that recently forayed into equity broking, aims to be India’s top wealth manager as the owner of the nation’s largest e-wallet expands its financial services footprint.

“As we progress in this journey of becoming the preferred platform for users to save and invest, our goal is to provide a simple platform for users to do so,” Varun Sridhar, chief executive officer at digital investment unit of One97 Communications Pvt., told BloombergQuint in an interview. “With a few clicks you are able to save and make your money work harder.”

Paytm Money, which has 200-300 million customers doing 20-30 million transactions daily, aims to capitalise on its existing user base. “We see about 80%-odd users who are, what I’d call, important or very loyal Paytm users, and about 20% come from outside the system.”

And Sridhar expects a similar trend for its newly launched equity brokering platform. To ensure the success of its new financial product, Paytm Money has an ambitious plan to expand the capital market in its entirety.

Although the markets have grown over the past 20 years, “the reach is still thin”, Sridhar said. Of the 12-13 million retail investors in India, only 3 million are professionally managing their money. “Our goal as a platform would be to bring in 10-12 million additional users to the market side. That’d be our strength and skill.”

“I would love that everybody in India who dreams to own a part of Reliance (Reliance Industries Ltd.), a part of HDFC, a part of some of these top stocks should be able to do so with ease,” he said, adding equity markets are still a privilege of only some.

Besides, Sridhar expects Paytm Money, whose offerings also include insurance, NPS and digital gold, to expand into newer categories. “Step-by-step, you can expect a lot more.”