FY26 was a milestone year for us. We became full year profitable for the first time in our history, on clean Profit After Tax, while continuing to gain market share in payments and expanding our merchant franchise profitably. At our 26th Annual General Meeting, our Founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma and President and Group CFO Madhur Deora spoke about the road ahead: compounding profitable growth across payments and financial services, winning back consumer market share, and building artificial intelligence into a new business through Paytm Intelligence, or Pi.
Opening the AGM, Vijay described FY26 as a turning point, anchored on clean profitability with no accounting add-ons. “FY26 was a milestone year in our company’s history. After many years, we became full year profitable, with an operating profit and no extraordinary items or add-ons,” he said. “I’m very proud that, on the guidance of my fellow board members, we focused as a team to become completely PAT profitable, and FY2026 was our full year of profitability.”
A business built to stay profitable
The focus now is on sustaining and compounding this profitability while growing. Vijay pointed to the strength of the business model built around payments and financial services, and to how little it depends on any external support. “We have built this business on a zero base. Even if there is no MDR, no merchant discount rate, no fees on merchants, and no grant or support from any regulatory body or government, our business will remain profitable in the foreseeable future,” he said.
The confidence is backed by the numbers. PAT improved by around ₹1,200 crore in FY26, and our cash balance stood at ₹13,529 crore as of the June 2026 quarter, giving us continued optionality to fund growth from our own accruals across a large addressable market in both consumers and merchants, high-margin financial services distribution, and AI-led operating leverage.
Consumer payments growing at more than twice the industry
Consumer payments remain a key growth engine. Our consumer payments business grew 46% in FY26, more than two times faster than the industry, making Paytm India’s fastest-growing profitable consumer payments business. Vijay framed this growth as a direct route to market share. “UPI is continuously growing at double the market growth, so we are taking market share from our competition,” he said, adding that we remain committed to winning back the consumer market share we held in 2023 and 2024, and to keeping the consumer central to how Paytm is identified in India and internationally.
This growth is coming with discipline on customer acquisition. Vijay explained that customers are being acquired through superior products, referrals and word of mouth rather than proportionately higher marketing spend. “Our market share is increasing, while our marketing spend, in comparison, has grown very little instead of growing linearly,” he said, adding that consumer growth is increasingly a profit-driving business model.
Merchant franchise compounding profitably
Our merchant payments business remains a core strength. Over the past two years it has expanded across small, medium and large enterprise merchants, and across online and offline payments, while staying profitable. “Paytm, in the last two years, has come out as a strong merchant acquiring business,” Vijay said. “Paytm remains the payment acquirer of choice for small, large, all merchants in India.”
Madhur highlighted that the value of transactions processed by our merchant business grew 26%, while we added 27 lakh merchant subscriptions during the year, taking the base from 1.24 crore to more than 1.5 crore. We continue to see significant headroom beyond the largest cities, both in bringing more merchants onto payments and in distributing financial services to them, with our payments franchise providing the distribution layer for merchant loans, personal loans, wealth and other financial services. As Vijay puts it, the maturing of the payment franchise into higher margin financial services distribution is what lets us capture larger, profitable, monetisable customer growth.
Fintech capabilities entering the AI era
One of the strongest themes from our 26th AGM was the opportunity in artificial intelligence. Vijay outlined three kinds of companies emerging in the AI era, and made clear where Paytm intends to be. “There will be three kinds of companies in AI. One, those that use AI in their business. Second, those that make AI a business. And third, those that stay away from it,” he said. Paytm intends to both use AI across its operations and build it into a business.
“We see AI as an opportunity to create new revenue line items and new business for Paytm,” Vijay said. Our scale and distribution create an opportunity to take AI capabilities to small and medium businesses across India, and Vijay stressed that this capability is being built natively. “We, as a technology company, have this as a native capability. We don’t need to buy AI from outside,” he said. These capabilities have been brought together under Paytm Intelligence, or Pi. “AI offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our country, and we at Paytm are committed to extend our fintech revolution into the AI revolution in the country,” he added.
From using AI to building AI revenues
AI is already deployed across our business, from engineering and merchant sales to loan collections and consumer acquisition and retention. The next step is to take these capabilities outside Paytm. Vijay said we are building systems that help enterprises create an “agentic workforce,” running workflows and business processes and adding new revenue line items through the AI capabilities we build for them, with some services already being piloted with enterprise customers.
He also offered a timeline for when this could translate into revenue. “I’m very hopeful that around 500 days from today, which is about one and a half years, you will see certain line items of our AI revenues,” Vijay said. These revenues, he explained, are expected to emerge under our commerce and cloud verticals as we distribute cloud-based technology capabilities to enterprises, funded through the internal accruals generated by our profitable growth without disproportionately large investments.
As Vijay summed up, we remain committed to building “a scalable, profitable, very large Paytm as a business in India and from India.”
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