Paytm appoints Anuj Mittal as VP-Investor Relations as stock takes hit

Fintech major Paytm has appointed Anuj Mittal as Vice President, Investor Relations, according to a source close to the developments. Mittal would be reporting directly to Paytm President and Group CFO Madhur Deora.

This comes at a time when Paytm's stock has been pummelled, in line with the fate of many other technology stocks globally. The fintech company's shares were trading at Rs 538 at the time of publishing on Tuesday, losing around three-fourths of the value after a blockbuster initial public offering at Rs 2,150 apiece in November last year.

Some of Mittal's areas of expertise are Investor Relations, Strategy, Mergers & Acquisitions, Financial Risk Management, Credit underwriting, and Treasury sales. In his role, Mittal is expected to drive the company’s corporate-investor relations, acting as a liaison between the management and investors.

Business Standard has reached out to the company seeking a comment on the appointment and this story will be updated when the company's response is received.

According to his LinkedIn profile, he has joined Paytm from L&T Financial Services where he served as Head of Strategy and Investor Relations. He has also served in leadership roles at some of the most reputed financial services companies including JP Morgan, Standard Chartered Bank and Piramal Capital. He has nearly 19 years of experience working in the financial services sector and has spent a decade in leadership roles.

Paytm has faced the ire of analysts who have questioned its earnings from loan disbursals and thinly-spread out business model across cloud services, gaming and e-commerce, among other things.

In the December quarter, Paytm saw its revenue increase 89 per cent to Rs 1,456 crore on a year-on-year basis, whereas net loss widened 45 per cent to Rs 778 crore.

However, the company said that its contribution profit (defined as revenue from operations less payment processing charges, promotional cashback and incentives, and other direct costs) improved to 31.2 per cent of revenue in Q3FY22 from 8.9 per cent in Q3FY21.

One of India’s leading fintech companies, Paytm’s lending business scaled to 4.1 million loan disbursals during the first two months of the March quarter (y-o-y growth of 449 per cent), with approximately 2.2 million loans disbursed in February 2022. This aggregates to a total loan value of Rs 2,095 crore (y-o-y growth of 366 per cent).