Paytm Shrinks Losses as Loan Business Surges 64%

Indian mobile commerce and payments FinTech Paytm is seeing its expansion into new areas pay off.

The company on Friday (Oct. 20) released quarterly earnings showing its revenues grow, driven in part by a 64% increase in financial services income, while its losses shrank.

“For Q2 FY 2024, we continued our momentum with 32% YoY revenue growth, despite some of the revenues getting pushed to Q3 FY 2024,” the company said.

For example, online sales for India’s festive season this year will be captured in the next quarter, whereas last year, these sales were mostly recorded in the second quarter.

“Revenue growth was led by increase in GMV, merchant subscription revenues, and growth of loans distributed through our platform,” the release said.

“As we continue see opportunities to garner market share, and our profitability remains on track, we are choosing to invest in growth,” the company continued. “We have increased our sales employees (cost of expanding platform), mainly for devices business.”

These devices, the company said, were helping drive revenue in its merchant payments business. Among Paytm’s devices is the payment acceptance tool for merchants that it introduced last month. As PYMNTS reported, Card Soundbox lets merchants accept mobile and card payments using the company’s Soundbox with “tap and pay” capabilities.

“We have found that merchants and consumers need card acceptance as simply as mobile payments with Paytm QR Code,” Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said on the company blog. “The launch of Card Soundbox will go a long way in merging the two requirements of merchants — mobile payments and card payments.”

A report Friday by Reuters says investors suspect Paytm will become profitable next year, with analysts projecting it soon to be one of the world’s most profitable FinTechs.

As noted here late last month, the question of profitability “is a pressing one in the FinTech realm, because momentum — once prized by investors, and particularly venture capital and private equity outfits that once had been reliable sources of funding — is no longer enough.”

These investors, wrote PYMNTS, are dealing with their own high-performance standards when it comes to deploying capital, because that capital comes from their own clients.