Inside Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s team driving Paytm’s core business

Over the last two years, the top deck at Paytm owner One97 Communications has changed from mostly product managers and technology professionals to look more like a financial services conglomerate. The IPO-bound company’s organization chart reveals it is currently run by seasoned banking, financial services and technology professionals, all reporting to the company’s founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma.

With banking, payments, credit and insurance making up its financial services business, and cloud services, ticketing, games and other such businesses, Paytm is a large-scale corporation. As the top executive, Sharma has 15 direct reportees running Paytm’s various businesses. 

The changes at Paytm have taken shape over the previous 2-3 years. The company has undergone a massive churn. Key executives—including Kiran Vasireddy who was heading operations, Deepak Abbot, who led payments; Nitin Misra who was heading business, Pravin Jadhav, who led Paytm Money; Jaskaran Kapany, who was heading marketing; Amit Veer, who was the chief business officer; and Siddharth Pandey, who was leading the payment gateway business—all quit over the previous 2 years. Recently, Paytm’s president Amit Nayyar quit.

“Paytm internally transformed from a startup to a financial services company. The product and technology people were all replaced by people with long years of experience in banks and global MNCs,” said an employee who recently quit Paytm.