Paytm Expects India’s Central Bank to Allow It to Take on New Customers Within a Few Months

Paytm has said it is optimistic that India’s central bank will let it accept new customers in the next few months, Reuters wrote Sunday (May 22), after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) ordered an audit of the company’s IT systems and blocked it from taking on new customers in March.

The audit came as the RBI cited “material” supervisory concerns that the bank had seen, and didn’t elaborate further. The company’s rule that Paytm couldn’t take on new customers also came about because of this, and Paytm is reportedly working with the bank on the issues.

“The process is underway and we think it should take three to five months from where we are right now,” Madhur Deora, Paytm’s group chief financial officer, told Reuters.

Paytm previously denied a Bloomberg news report that said RBI discovered Paytm’s servers had been sharing information with Chinese entities which owned indirect stakes.

Paytm’s parent company One 97 Communications had a bigger fourth-quarter loss because of higher payment processing, marketing and employee costs, though the report noted the company was likely to be profitable by September of 2023.

In March, PYMNTS wrote that Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma tried to ease concerns over the reports of user information being leaked to Chinese firms by saying investors don’t have assets to customer data.

Read more: Paytm CEO: Investors Don’t Have Access to User Data

Sharma said none of the investors had access to the company’s customer database and the central bank hadn’t been concerned with data storage or access.

“There is no access of any bank customer data to any person, of any nationality ... RBI has not mentioned anything in relation to investors,” Sharma said.

This all comes as Paytm made its stock market debut in November 2021, which ended up being one of the country’s biggest initial public offerings (IPOs).