Paytm in talks with ICICI Group, SBI Mutual Fund and IIFL for tie-ups

MUMBAI: Paytm, the digital wallet and e-commerce company, is talking to ICICI Group -ICICI Bank, ICICI Prudential and ICICI Lombard - for its banking and insurance ventures, and is also negotiating with Citibank, IndusInd and a few other small-finance banks for banking partnerships.

For mutual fund partners, Paytm is talking to SBI Mutual Fund and IIFL, as it reaches the last leg of finalising its banking, insurance and mutual fund partners for its payments bank operations.

Varun Khullar, head, partnership division, Paytm, while confirming the development, said that the company is currently evaluating potential tie-ups, but none of the partners had been finalised yet.

In December last year, Paytm teamed up with ICICI Bank to offer virtual prepaid cards to its wallet users that can be used to pay for purchases, both online and offline.

The tie-up allows Paytm's customers to top up their digital wallets at any ICICI Bank branch by using cash or cheques.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and chief executive of One97 Communication that runs Paytm, is one of the 11 to get Reserve Bank of India's permission last year to open a payments bank, and he had expressed his wish that he wants to be the first player to launch such a bank in the country.

"We want to be the first payments bank in the country. We have the technology with us, have to create simple organisational structure, while people recruitment is on, which is critical," Sharma had told ET in an interview last September. While Paytm is looking to finalise two insurance partners - one mutual fund partner and multiple banking partners - it is not considering too many tie-ups to avoid glitches that may arise from technical assimilation.

Paytm has plans to mobilise nearly one million business correspondents to expand its payments bank operations.