After a prolonged slowdown in its consumer payments business, One 97 Communications, which runs Paytm, is renewing focus on this segment in order to claw back market share.
Addressing stock market analysts a day after the company declared its December quarter results, Paytm chief executive Vijay Shekhar Sharma said the company is working on building consumer products.
The company’s consumer vertical was majorly impacted after the RBI (Reserve Bank of India) shut down its payments bank in January 2024.
Per stock market filings, the company saw its monthly active users drop to around 7 crore in December 2024 from 10.8 crore that January. As of December 2025, this had inched up to around 7.6 crore. Even its consumer payment volumes went up to Rs 5.1 lakh crore in the recent December quarter, compared to Rs 3.8 lakh crore a year back.
Paytm has upped its marketing spends in Q3FY26, indicating that it’s open to spending money to acquire quality customers.
“Promotional spends (are for) market share gain and consumer retention. The focus is on (acquiring) high quality users and high quality retention,” Madhur Deora, group chief financial officer, Paytm, said during the analysts’ call on Friday. The company is also looking to scale its buy-now-pay-later service and plans to achieve monthly disbursals of Rs 100 crore within the next three months. It has already onboarded 100,000 customers for this product.
Paytm reported a net profit of Rs 225 crore in Q3FY26 on operating revenues of Rs 2,194 crore, up 20% from Rs 1,828 crore a year back.
After working on getting its business back on track over the last two years with focus on its core offerings, Sharma said that the company is at a point where it can scale quickly with the right product mix and efficient marketing.
Paytm recently brought all its payment businesses under Paytm Payments Services (PPSL), a subsidiary of One 97 Communications, with Sharma as the CEO. Both the offline and online payment segments will be housed under PPSL now.
Sharma said that margins are good in the online payments business and the firm would aim to capture the same.
Interestingly, the company is also focussing on its wealth management subsidiary, Paytm Money, which is one of the smallest stockbrokers in the country, not even among the top 10. Deora said that the broking entity is starting to show early signs of revival.
Sharma’s aim is to make Paytm one of the top five brokers in three years, thereby competing directly with the likes of Angel One, Groww, and Zerodha.
