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Paytm founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Vijay Shekhar Sharma said the fintech company will eye selective inorganic growth opportunities over the next 12 months, with any new investments limited to the AI space.
“Any new investment, only in AI,” Sharma said twice during the Q4 FY26 earnings call.
According to the management, Paytm is currently sitting on a dry powder of Rs 13,315 crore.
“I feel lucky that we did not dump a lot of money earlier, because in the AI world, everything resets. So we see it as an opportunity to bring some product that is materially metaphor from now to 2030. What worked in 2020 is not going to work in 2030. So, anybody (including rival companies) that is not investing in AI is an opportunity for us – that person’s customer,” Sharma said.
Notably, Paytm’s founder had previously said that the company viewed AI as a revenue line item.
Agentic AI in stock broking, travel ticketing: Shedding light on the company’s AI roadmap, Sharma said that Paytm will invest heavily in AI to scale up its stock broking platform Paytm Money.
“AI is changing everything. Agents will show up that will do trading. Agents will take care of your portfolio re-adjustment, review your trading strategy,” said the Paytm founder.
During the March quarter, Paytm saw increased monetisation across equity broking, Margin Trading Facility and other wealthtech products, including Paytm Gold. Beyond payments and credit businesses, the management sees wealthtech as the third leg of revenue growth for the company.
Additionally, the fintech company is also experimenting with a fully agentic chat interface for its travel ticketing platform Paytm Checkin to check user compatibility.
“This is our dip test that how Indian consumers are okay for an agentic interface. I see agentic interface as a rejuvenated new opportunity for Paytm to gain consumer shares, in a dramatic number of categories. This is our experiment layer,” Sharma said.
He also highlighted the funnel conversion on agentic interface is 7X to 8X higher than a normal interface.
Key financial services customers on the platform increased 36% to 7.5 lakh in Q4 FY26 from 5.5 lakh in the same quarter last year. This only includes customers and merchants who’ve availed Paytm’s financial services offerings, equity broking, insurance and credit products. Those who availed mutual fund distribution, Postpaid loans, gold savings were excluded as their contribution to revenue was negligible.
No plan to build data centre: Despite the scale of its AI ambitions, Paytm does not plan to building its own data centre infrastructure. The management believes it cannot compete with big US tech firms in this space. Instead, the company may rent compute capacity from providers including NVIDIA and run its own models on top of third-party infrastructure.
“There is enough capex (capital expenditure) that big US firms are doing, and we don’t think we have a game in that yet. We do believe there is an opportunity for us to invest in AI. We are using agents for customers. We can rent a data centre somewhere and then run our model on top of it,” Sharma told an analyst during the earnings call.
Where else is Paytm deploying AI? In its Q4 FY26 investor presentation, Paytm said it is increasingly embedding AI in its entire tech stack. The company is building applied AI models on top of open source models and small language models for merchants and customers. These models are tailormade for Paytm-specific tasks such as payments intelligence, fraud prevention, merchant onboarding and collection.
Going forward, Paytm plans to sharpen its focus on marketing services. Revenue from this vertical declined 10% year-on-year (YoY) to Rs 239 crore in the quarter ended March 2026. Over the next 12 months, the company plans to use AI to bolster merchant engagement and increase revenue in this segment.
How are payments and financial services businesses doing? During the earnings call, Paytm Group CFO highlighted that payments roughly accounted for 55% of Paytm’s total operating revenue, while financial services’ share in the revenue pie was 30%.
“We are seeing strong tailwinds in payments under Paytm Payments Services Limited, both offline merchants as well as online merchants, which has the full licence now and is adding new customers. We are also seeing very good growth in financial services. Merchant loans continue to be solid, and we are now seeing a recovery in personal loan and market share growth in wealth,” Deora said.
The company also said that it gained market share in the UPI segment every single month for the last one year, with consumer UPI gross transaction value surging 46% YoY to Rs 5.5 lakh crore in Q4 FY26.
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