The latest capital infusion comes at a time when deposits of top payments banks have grown by over 70%. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI<\/a>), in a response to an Right to Information (RTI<\/a>) filing by TOI, said that payments bank deposits stood at close to Rs 940 crore at the end of December 2018. While the large players are growing their customer base, payments banks as a business are yet to develop a sustainable business model as they are barred from lending. Existing banks are still in early stages of trying to generate revenue by cross-selling products and services to account holders.
Across payments banks, largely dominated by Paytm<\/a> and Airtel<\/a>, total deposits were to the tune of about Rs 540 crore in May 2018. The figures shared by the RBI in the RTI are as of December 2018. According to the RTI response, Airtel and Paytm banks together have about 75% of total deposits with Paytm being ahead of Airtel at the end of 2018. Airtel and Paytm had deposits of Rs 320 crore and Rs 371 crore respectively for the same period.
The regulatory filings were sourced from business intelligence platform Tofler. From April to December 2018, close to 4 crore new payments bank accounts were opened even though the full financial year ending March 2018 witnessed 11.6 crore new accounts being opened. Payments bank are barred from holding deposits of more than Rs 1 lakh per account at the end of the day although they cannot control intra-day inflows.
In response to TOI’s e-mailed query, Airtel Payments Bank MD & CEO Anubrata Biswas<\/a> said the bank will continue to invest and scale up operations to tap the market opportunity. “Airtel Payments Bank is seeing rapid business growth, driven by our unmatched reach through our 5 lakh retail banking points, digital propositions and large customer base. The bank has developed a robust platform to take convenient digital banking services to the vast under-banked population, across individuals and merchants,” said Biswas.
After RBI granted in-principle approval to set up payments banks to 11 applicants, three applicants dropped out including Sun Pharma promoter Dilip Shanghvi. Apart from Airtel and Paytm, Fino, India Post<\/a> are the operational payments banks. NSDL Payments Bank, Jio Payments Bank and Aditya Birla Payments Bank (ABPB) are yet to be fully operational and have limited presence currently.
Another big hit to the payments bank business model was the Supreme Court order barring the use of Aadhaar for any purpose other than enabling government benefits. Most banks had build a customer acquisition model using Aadhaar for paperless fulfilment of “know your customer” (KYC) norms.
In May, TOI had reported saying Paytm’s payments bank reported profitability for the financial year ending March 2019, largely driven by non-core revenues such as interest incomes. At the end of March 2018, Airtel Payments Bank reported a revenue of Rs 160 crore over a loss of Rs 272 crore. The company’s total expenses for the fiscal were reported as Rs 433 core. Paytm had said it reported revenue of Rs 1,500 crore at the end of March 2019 with a net profit of Rs 20 crore.
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