FY26 was a defining year for us. We reported our first full year of profit, driven by strong growth across payments and financial services, and continued AI-led operating leverage across the business. Revenue grew 22% YoY to ₹8,437 Cr, while EBITDA improved by ₹2,008 Cr YoY to ₹502 Cr.
During our recent earnings call, our Founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma, and President & Group CFO Madhur Deora spoke about the momentum across payments and financial services, growing market share gains, and the opportunities ahead in AI-led marketing services, commerce and customer engagement.
Building the next frontier with AI-led marketing services
Starting our Q4FY26 Earnings call, Vijay spoke about how Paytm has built strong leadership in payments and financial services through focused execution over the years, and how innovation in marketing services will drive the next phase of growth. He said, “We’ve built strong moats in payments and financial services by staying focused. Now, our next frontier is what we call marketing services which includes cloud, commerce, and AI-driven engagement that brings customers back after checkout, whether online or in-store.” With AI agents, he said, this is going to be a major area of focus for us over the next 12 months.
On this, Vijay shared “Agentic is a renewed opportunity for Paytm to gain market share across a number of categories. Seven times more people complete the funnel in an agentic workflow.”
We’re building applied AI models on top of open-source foundation models, with small language models built for the SMB context, optimised for voice and Indian languages. The bigger investment, as Vijay put it, is the long-term commitment and execution required to make meaningful progress in this direction. “In the AI world, everything resets. We see AI as an opportunity to build products that remain materially important from now to 2030 and beyond,” he said.
Strong tailwinds across payments business
Our payments business continued to see strong momentum across consumers, offline merchants and online businesses. Merchant GMV grew 27% YoY to ₹6.5 lakh Cr, while subscription merchants reached 1.51 Cr. Payment processing margins expanded to comfortably above 4 bps, driven by pricing discipline and higher growth of profitable MDR-bearing instruments including credit cards on UPI and affordability offerings such as EMI.
The Soundbox has also evolved meaningfully. It is no longer just a payment confirmation device, it is increasingly becoming a small business operating system, delivering business insights, customer notifications and merchant support in the languages merchants already speak.
On the consumer side, our UPI GTV grew 46% YoY, which was 2.2x the industry growth rate, and we have gained UPI consumer market share every single month for the past year. MTUs expanded by 50 lakh YoY to 7.7 Cr.
Our CFO Madhur highlighted that apart from MTU growth, quality of customers and merchants continue to be an important part of our growth story. “What’s far more important is that customer engagement has risen dramatically across the platform. The market share gains we’re seeing are significantly outpacing MTU growth reinforcing that quality of customers and depth of engagement matter more,” he added.
Vijay added to this, “GMV growth is accelerating not just because MTUs grew, but because usage per customer did. We focus on customer quality, product quality, and engagement, not just volume.”
Financial services growth remains broad-based and resilient
Distribution of financial services revenue grew 52% YoY to ₹2,593 Cr in FY2026, reflecting the strength of our high-growth, high-margin, distribution-only business model.
Madhur said, “Merchant loans continue to perform solidly, while we are now seeing recovery in personal loans alongside market share gains in wealth management. Growth momentum is broad-based and strengthening.”
Across equity broking, Margin Trade Funding, Mutual Fund SIPs and Digital Gold, AI-led personalisation is driving higher engagement and revenue per active customer. As Vijay said, over time, Paytm can be looked at as a company that monetised payments really well, and wealth is a critical part of that journey.
Growth acceleration with further operating leverage
Looking ahead to FY2027, we expect growth to accelerate with further EBITDA margin expansion, driven by four compounding engines already in motion: (1) Expansion of merchant payments; (2) Structural growth in merchant loans distribution; (3) Consumer lifecycle monetisation; and (4) Continued AI-led operating leverage
As Madhur summarised, “Our growth has been driven by three core levers: expanding the customer base, increasing penetration, and growing ticket sizes, and this quarter all three have contributed fairly evenly, roughly 15% each, creating a balanced and resilient growth engine.”
Author
