Paytm hires Kiran Vasireddy as COO for payments business

Paytm on Tuesday announced appointed of Kiran Vasireddy as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) for its payments business.

Going forward, Kiran will be overseeing all product and business functions for the payments division in line with its growth plan for bringing 500 million Indians into the mainstream economy.

Over his nearly decade long association with Paytm, Kiran has held several key business roles and played a pivotal part in leading the firm's payment solution to become the country's leading digital payment method.

Under his leadership, Paytm has ventured into multiple new avenues for digital payments across categories such as utility payments, transportation, education fees and metro recharges, among others.

In addition, Kiran has spearheaded the company's offline payment and its QR code solution across large organized retailers, parking lots, hospitals, tolls, petrol pumps, corporate food courts and neighborhood offline stores. In a short span of time, Paytm has enabled millions of small merchants to accept payments at their stores with Paytm's QR code solution.

"Kiran and his team have built our payment business and led it to top of the charts in India. Under his leadership, Paytm will reach new heights and create many global benchmarks," said founder and CEO Paytm, Vijay Shekhar Sharma.

"At Paytm, we are absolutely committed to make digital payments extremely simple and accessible. This will help us in our vision to bring financial inclusion to half a billion people in our country. This year, we are aiming for ten million merchants on our platform, which puts us on the right path to build one of the largest payment networks in the world," said Chief Operating Officer Paytm, Kiran Vasireddy.

Paytm was the first company to invest in proprietary QR Code-based payments. Today this category is powering digital payments for over five million offline merchants and aiming to reach 10 million merchants by year-end.

Its unique scan-to-pay solution has become ubiquitous with digital payments in the country. This zero cost payment solution combined with Paytm's large customer base and breadth of use cases has enabled it to build the largest and fastest-growing payment network in the country.