“Paytm Payments Bank Executives Seek New Opportunities as Uncertainty Spooks Them; Rush to Recruiters for Job Security”

Recruiters are being flooded with resumes and job applications from employees of Paytm Payments Bank and its parent firm One97 Communications, who fear there could be more regulatory trouble ahead for the digital-payments company.

Employees across levels in tech, merchant banking, sales and marketing are ready to take pay cuts elsewhere at a time when offers are hard to come by.

The flood of resumes began after the Reserve Bank of India cracked the whip on Paytm Payments Bank last week for failing to implement process changes despite repeated warnings about falsified compliances, and irregularities in KYC norms and related-party transactions.

Meanwhile, at a virtual town hall on Saturday, the company’s founder and chief executive Vijay Shekhar Sharma tried to assuage employees’ fears about the future of the group, which employs about 35,000 people.

“Given the withdrawal of Paytm from the small-ticket lending business there was a significant layoff of employees very recently and our marketplace received resumes from them,” said Ramachandran A, CEO of MyRCloud, an AI/ML-driven recruitment marketplace.

“However, after the RBI statement on Paytm, we are seeing CVs from different sets of talent including data science, back-end engineers and other tech talent coming in.”

The platform, which has about 1,500 recruiters, has seen a few hundred resumes uploaded over the past week. “Partners on our platform have received 300-400 CVs, largely from juniors to middle management,” Ramachandran told Mint.

Sharma and senior leadership told employees during Saturday’s town hall that their jobs were safe and only performance-based retrenchment was being done.

According to a company executive, Sharma said during the hour-long town hall that the company was in touch with RBI and that the regulator’s action would have a worst-case impact of ₹300-500 crore on its annual Ebitda.

In response to Mint’s queries, Paytm said the questions were speculative

While junior and  middle management employees of the company are looking for jobs in the banking and finance sector, senior candidates doing so will have to revisit their stock offers when negotiating compensation with other firms.

“Some of the established fintechs – especially payment-solutions firms – attract leadership talent with a combination of fixed and variable pay, and stock options. These stock options could run into crores, which is making it hard for some employees to find other opportunities easily,” said Upasana Agarwal, partner for professional and financial services at ABC Consultants, an executive search and talent advisory firm.

A partner at another recruitment firm that has placed senior level executives from One97 Communications said middle and senior management have been reaching to them since last year. 

“The company retrenched employees over the past few months and candidates reached out for jobs. Many of Paytm’s employees draw salaries that are higher than the market rate and will have to take a pay cut,” the partner added. 

Paytm’s parent firm said, however, that it expects to continue improving its profitability. Sharma told analysts and investors on Thursday that the RBI’s restrictions were a “speed bump”.

In a blog post, the company cited a post by Sharma on X, in which he wrote, “To every Paytmer, your favourite app is working, will keep working beyond 29 February as usual.”