New Delhi: PayTm, India’s leading financial technology (fintech) company has been approached by country’s telecom tycoon Sunil Mittal for a stake in the former, a leading business portal Bloomberg reported, quoting people with inside information of the deal. It says that Bharti CEO Sunil Mittal has mooted a proposal to merge his financial services unit Airtel Payments bank into PayTM payments bank. The telecom tycoon has shown interest towards merging fintech unit into PayTm Payments Bank in a stocks deal and also expressed desire to buy PayTm shares from other shareholders. It also reported that talks are in preliminary stage and nothing could be ascertained about the proposed deal. Vijay Shekhar-led PayTm has been embattled with many challenges after it launched its Initial Public Offering (IPO). The IPO which list at about Rs 2000 per share went into a downward spiral and never floated above the listing price. Its worst ever share plunge left its investors bleeding. The company’s falling fortunes has eroded investments of lakhs of investors, however, the CEO remains confident about its revival. PayTm, earlier called One97 Communications Ltd has seen good revival in last few days, however, it’s far from the target. It also informed the Exchange last month that the company narrowed its third-quarter loss on back of its ‘soaring’ revenue. The publication says that it reached out to both the industry giants for development on the deal. Bharti declined to respond while PayTm denied any such discussion/talks. About Airtel & PayTm Payments Bank Sunil Mittal-led Airtel Payments Bank is a 6-year-old payments bank with a wide customer base of about 129 million and also remains a profitable enterprise. PayTm Payments Bank, launched in 2015 is an extension of mobile payment company PayTm. The company’s promoters include Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. and China’s Ant Group Co.
