Exclusive: Paytm ropes in Walmart’s Harsh Gupta to lead its merchant payments

Paytm has hired Harsh Gupta, the director of product management at Walmart’s mobile payment app, to lead its merchant payments, said two sources aware of the matter.

This would be the second top-level hiring for One97 Communication group’s payments division in the past few weeks. Last month, it had roped in Anubhav Sharma, who was the head of UPI and IMPS at the National Payments Corporations of India, as the vice president of Paytm Payments Bank.

Entrackr had exclusively reported his appointment.

“Gupta has already joined Paytm and the company is likely to announce it soon. The company has been expanding its merchant payments business and hiring of Gupta with plenty of experience in e-commerce and payments will be quite significant at this stage,” said one of the sources on the condition of anonymity.

Gupta has over close to 20 years of experience in e-commerce, payments, product management, business analytics and customer engagement. He was the head of Walmart’s payments app ‘Cashi’ for the past three and a half years. 

After a series of departures of senior-level executives, Paytm has been trying to fill the key positions. Sources emphasised that Gupta’s appointment is a smart move and his experience will be instrumental in shaping merchant focused payments offerings. 

Paytm has over 16 million merchants on the platform, which accepts payments through wallet, cards, UPI and it recently launched the all-in-one Android PoS device for them.

Paytm has been facing competition from BharatPe, PhonePe and Google Pay in the QR-code-based payments space. The company also entered the point of sale (PoS) business where it directly competes with Pine Labs, Innoviti, Mswipe and others. 

“Gupta won’t have an easy ride as he will be solely responsible to create cohesive strategies and a roadmap to grow merchants payments across both QR-code-based payments and PoS business,” added the second source.

Paytm declined to comment for the story while Gupta could not be reached out immediately.

Appointment of Gupta is crucial for the company after the departure of Puneet Jain who was managing enterprise sales and payments operations. Entrackr had exclusively reported on his resignation. Recently, Jain joined HT Media as the CEO of HT Digital Streams.