Paytm Payments Bank on March 27 said that its payments wallets are now interoperable with other wallets and that it will now earn 1.1 percent of transactions as interchange revenue when its customers make payments to merchants on other payment aggregators or banks.
Reacting to this news, shares of Paytm parent, One 97 Communications, rose three percent on the BSE on March 28. At 9:29 am, shares of the company were up 1 percent at Rs 627.35.
The National Payments Corporation of India, the de-facto regulatory body of the united payments interface (UPI), had announced wallet interoperability guidelines last week.
“The bank will pay 15 basis points (bps) of charges for adding more than Rs 2,000 using UPI, and in turn will also earn 15 bps when any other wallets use the bank to add more than Rs 2,000 using UPI,” the company said.
Paytm Payments Bank is an associate of One97 Communications, the parent company of fintech major Paytm. It claims to have been the top UPI beneficiary bank for 21 months in a row and registered 1,657.41 million transactions in February 2023.
“We would like to add that OCL will have a beneficial impact in the form of meaningfully lower interchange fees paid to PPBL for Paytm wallet since this is now based on the lower standardised interchange,” the company said in an exchange filing.
Meanwhile, a subsidiary of the fintech unicorn, Paytm Payment Services Ltd (PPSL), has received an extension from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to resubmit its application for a payment aggregator (PA) licence.
The central bank has also allowed PPSL to continue its operation as a payment aggregator while it awaits approval from the government on the past investments received from One97 Communications, according to a recent exchange filing.
“As per RBI’s letter, on receipt of approval from GoI (Government of India), PPSL will have 15 days to submit the application seeking authorisation for PPSL to operate as an online PA. However, if any adverse decision is taken by the GoI, then the same shall be informed to RBI immediately,” One97 Communications informed the stock exchanges on March 26.
“During this process, PPSL can continue with its online payment aggregation business for existing partners, without onboarding any new merchants,” it added.
The latest developments will have “no material impact” on PPSL's business and revenues, the company claimed, adding that the communication from RBI is applicable “only to onboarding of new online merchants and we can continue to provide payment services to our existing online merchants”.
