The company is investing towards building advanced capabilities in AI, in the context of bolstering its loan distribution business, he added.
“By helping enable digital loan collection on app, we are now creating a small revolution for financial inclusion, where a loan of as small as a few hundred rupees can be disbursed and collected at very miniscule cost. In India’s Digital revolution after mobile payments, Paytm’s next contribution will be – small mobile credit with high credit quality and fully compliant with the regulators guidelines,” said Sharma in the shareholder letter.
Paytm is now making lending the cornerstone of its business. Currently, it does not have a lending licence and is working as a loan sourcing platform for its financial partners. The company’s application for a payment aggregator licence was recently returned by the RBI.
“Expectedly this requires sophisticated capabilities in AI and other technologies. I am very proud of our Advanced AI capabilities in use and how we are expanding,” Sharma said.
The fintech founder also added that the company’s AI capabilities can potentially be also leveraged outside India.
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“Paytm is investing in AI with an eye on building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) software stack. We believe by building it in India we are not only making our country’s tech capability, but also creating something that could be leveraged outside India,” said Sharma. As per the latest data, Paytm disbursed Rs 5,194 crore worth of loans in July, more than double from a year earlier. For the same month, the company processed a merchant gross merchandise value (GMV) of Rs 1.47 lakh crore, up 38% on year.
For Paytm, the GMV is nothing but the total payment value processed through its platform.
This is not the first time that Sharma has been vocal about AGI. In his previous shareholder letter in May, Sharma had said the technology is “ripe for innovation” and that the company’s technology teams had seen some ‘encouraging results’ in the AGI domain.
In March, news agency Reuters reported that US fintech major Stripe was beginning to integrate OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 artificial intelligence model into its digital payment processing and other products.
India a net exporter of payments
In his letter on Monday, Sharma said India has the opportunity to be a net exporter of payment technology.
“In India, we can expect 500 million payment consumers and 100 million merchants not very far in future… I believe India has an opportunity to become a net exporter of payment technology, software and hardware, and I expect Paytm to lead the way in this.”
For Paytm, its hardware innovation Soundbox has been critical in building on its payments business topline and to ensure retention of its merchant partners
“Our R&D design and software capabilities are the best in the world, in which Paytm Labs is constantly building various AI and big data features that enhance payment trust, when consumers or merchants use Paytm,” added Sharma.
Shares of One 97 closed at Rs 837.95 apiece on the BSE on Monday, down 2.5% from its previous close.
