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regular-article-logo Friday, 03 May 2024

Paytm chief executive Vijay Shekhar Sharma meets Nirmala Sitharaman as ED seeks info from RBI

While the company has close to 35 crore wallets, there were reports of Jio Financial Services and HDFC Bank eyeing the wallets business

Our Special Correspondent Mumbai Published 07.02.24, 10:31 AM
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Paytm’s chief executive Vijay Shekhar Sharma met Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday even as the Enforcement Directorate and the Financial Intelligence Unit have asked the RBI to share its report that led to the bar on Paytm Payments Bank Ltd.

Sharma and a few Paytm officials met the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) officials on Monday to discuss regulatory concerns.

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“Discussions are on about addressing the regulatory concerns and compliance issues with both the RBI and the ministry,” said one of the sources to Reuters.

While the company has close to 35 crore wallets, there were reports of Jio Financial Services (JFSL) and HDFC Bank eyeing the wallets business.

However, in a regulatory filing on Tuesday, JFSL denied it was engaged in any such discussions. Terming the report as “speculative’’, the Reliance arm said it has “not been in any negotiations’’.

But, a senior executive at HDFC Bank said that it is “talking” to Paytm as the fintech tries to find a way out of the current restrictions placed by the RBI.

Stressing that the bank would have been conversing with the fintech even otherwise given its partnership in the acceptance and aggregator space, HDFC Bank’s country head for payments Parag Rao said it is in a “wait and watch” mode.

Rao was replying to a question on reports about Paytm reaching out to large banks for support. “Under the current circumstances, we don’t know too much about what is happening but we are talking, we are waiting and watching to see how events develop. That is all I can say right now,” Rao said.

Massive outage

Customers of various banks on Tuesday evening complained of an outage in the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), saying they could not make payments through various apps.

Though the UPI services were down only for certain banks, it comes amid the tough action taken by the RBI against Paytm bank. While some Paytm customers also found it hard to make payments, it is learnt that this was limited to only those who had accounts linked to certain lenders such as HDFC Bank.

At the time of writing this report, the outage monitoring platform Downdetector showed complaints from customers of State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, HDFC Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank.

In a post on X, the National Payments Corporation of India said: “Regret inconvenience on UPI connectivity as few of the banks are having some internal technical issues. NPCI systems are working fine and we are working with these banks to ensure quick resolution.” NPCI operates UPI.

With inputs from Reuters

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