Former RBI official joins Paytm

In yet another major hiring for its proposed payments bank, India's largest mobile payments and commerce platform Paytm has brought in Vipin Surelia into its leadership team as vice-president (risk and compliance).

Surelia was earlier with National Payments Council of India as head (product development) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as its deputy general manager. He is the second person with RBI background to be hired for the payments bank core management team.

The company said Surelia was involved with the payments sector for 19 years having closely worked with Unique Identification Authority of India, RBI, banks and fintech partners on several occasions.

"He was in charge of rolling out various NPCI initiatives such as CTS (cheque truncation system), NACH (national automated clearing house), mobile payments, Aadhaar-based systems and unified payments interface. He has also been associated with IBM India and The Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation in leadership roles," the company said in a release.

Earlier, Surelia was a key member of RBI's payments operation team, and was an integral part of the central bank's first-generation real-time gross settlement systems project and national electronic funds transfer.

Founded by Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm is one of the 11 entities to have secured licence to start payments banks.

Paytm has planned an investment of Rs 1,200 crore for a three-year period for the bank. Among the senior executives who have already joined Paytm for the banking business are Kshitij Sanghi, formerly with McKinsey. Sanghi will look at the technology side as a vice-president.

Former Boston Consulting Group employee Narendra Singh has been hired as deputy general manager for a role in project management.

Also, Varun Khullar, who was with ITC earlier, has joined as vice-president to look at partnerships. Vikas Purohit, formerly with Amazon, is also a vice-president responsible for branch and business correspondents network.

Paytm plans to set up around 20 signature branches for the payments bank. In addition, there will be 200 smaller store-like branches and at least 1,000 agents.