Paytm sheds 20% in 2 days; drops out of the BSE top-100 market cap league

One97 Communications, the parent company of digital payments major Paytm, dropped out of the 100-most valued companies list on the BSE as the stock price of the company tanked a whopping 20 per cent in the last two trading sessions.

At 10:48 am; with market capitalisation (market cap) of Rs 40,863 crore, Paytm stood at 112th position in overall ranking of the BSE listed companies. The company lost market cap of Rs 60,537 crore since it's listing day. The company had made its market debut on November 18, 2021. It was at the 51th position in overall ranking with market cap of Rs 1.01 trillion.

The stock hit a record high of Rs 1,961.05 on November 18 in intra-day trade, but has failed to touch its issue price post listing. The stock has lost 71 per cent from its issue price of Rs 2,150 per share.

On Tuesday, the stock hit a new low of Rs 616.55, down 9 per cent in intra-day trade on back of heavy volumes. The trading volume at the counter jumped over three-fold with a combined 9.71 million equity shares changing hands on the NSE and BSE.

In the past two trading sessions, the stock slipped 20 per cent on back of negative news flow. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday, March 11, 2022 barred Paytm Payments Bank (PPBL) from onboarding new customers with immediate effect because of certain supervisory concerns. PPBL processes transactions for India’s digital payments giant Paytm.

The banking regulator has directed PPBL to appoint an IT audit firm for conducting a comprehensive system audit of its IT system. Paytm PB will need specific permission from the RBI to restart onboarding of customers following a review of the audit. Paytm has said that, PPBL, was taking immediate steps to comply with RBI directions and was looking to appoint a reputed external auditor to conduct a comprehensive systems audit of its IT systems.

The company said the RBI order does not impact any existing customers of PPBL, who can continue to use all banking and payment services without interruption. All existing users of Paytm UPI, Paytm Wallet, Paytm FASTag, and bank accounts can continue to use these instruments, including debit cards and net banking, for payments, in an exchange filing.

According to media reports, PPBL was barred from taking on new customers because it violated rules by allowing data to flow to servers abroad and didn’t properly verify its customers.

Meanwhile, Paytm Payments Bank termed the Bloomberg report claiming data leak to Chinese firms being the reason behind RBI’s action on the company as “false and sensationalist.”