Paytm files for 16,600-cr IPO

New Delhi: India's leading digital payments and financial services platform Paytm has filed for a Rs 16,600 crore IPO, which is touted to be India's largest market debut. The company filed its draft red herring prospectus on Friday, which gave insights into how the most well known brand in financial services is growing.

One of the factors that stood out was Paytm's Gross Merchant Volume (GMV) is growing at a phenomenal rate, over a 100 per cent growth in just one year. In Q1FY22, Paytm's GMV hit Rs 1,469 billion in Q1FY22, which was Rs 697 billion in the first quarter of FY21. In the whole of FY21, Paytm's GMV stood at Rs 4,033 billion - highest in the payments industry as per Redseer.

In its DRHP, the company defines GMV as "the rupee value of total payments made to merchants through transactions on our app, through Paytm Payment Instruments or through our payment solutions, over a period. It excludes any consumer-to-consumer payment service such as money transfers". While the company saw an initial dip last year due to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, it quickly recovered and began to perform much better, beating its own record from the previous years. "Since lockdowns eased in India in the second quarter of FY 2021, our GMV has increased consistently for the rest of FY 2021 primarily due to an increase in the transactions of our online and in-store merchants. Even during the first quarter of FY 2022, which was impacted by the second wave of Covid-19, we saw continued growth in GMV," the company said in its DRHP.