Still, if payments are no different from plumbing, are they really lucrative enough to get this unicorn any closer to its goal of becoming India’s first $100 billion company, which, by the way, is twice the market value of PayPal Holdings Inc.?

HDFC Bank, which does as much credit card business in India as three of its nearest rivals put together, doesn’t appear to think so. “Wallets have no future," the bank’s managing director, Aditya Puri, declared recently. “You can’t have a business that says pay a 500-rupee bill and take 250 as cashback."

Puri would be right to be dismissive if Alibaba-backed Paytm was only about unsustainable discounts. But a Sanford C. Bernstein survey of Indian banking customers, conducted before the currency ban, showed a very different picture:

“Young bank customers could easily ditch plastic for Paytm," says Bernstein analyst Gautam Chhugani. So could small retailers, once Paytm becomes a deposit-taking financial institution next month. Merchants, who can’t afford to pay transaction costs as high as 1.8% on credit cards, could avoid them altogether as long as their funds remain parked in Paytm Bank current accounts.

The profit on this float could allow the start-up to compete for individual deposits by slashing the numerous fees that traditional lenders in India get away with. Adding third-party products like wealth-management services and insurance would be straightforward, too.

HDFC Bank won’t keel over. The lender has crunched its cost-to-income ratio even as it made significant investments in digital technologies. That’s not the only competition Paytm faces. The government is promoting a shared mobile-payment interface. Banks are conspiring to kill it. Even if they succeed, that still leaves India’s richest man in the fray: Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio, a new telco, this week signed up a payment partnership with Uber Technologies Inc. Coming soon: the Jio Payments Bank.

Just because Indian fintech start-ups lack the scale and sophistication of their Chinese peers doesn’t mean banks can take them lightly. If HDFC Bank manages to displace Paytm with its own PayZapp, Puri will remain the king of Indian payments and can diss standalone wallets all he wants. Until then, he should show his new rival some respect for snapping at his heels. Bloomberg

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