Paytm, Flipkart strengthen top management team

Digital payments company Paytm and Walmart-owned ecommerce major Flipkart have announced key appointments to strengthen their leadership team.

Paytm announced the appointment of former Google executives Praveen Sharma as senior vice president for ad business and Ankit Sinha as vice president to lead Paytm AI Cloud.

Sinha was regional business lead at Google Cloud for six years and focused on cloud sales and enterprise partnerships.

Sharma was the regional director of Asia Pacific for performance marketing solutions at Google in his last stint.

The company had recently elevated senior vice president Madhur Deora to lead consumer business and roped in Goldman Sachs executive Amit Nayyar as president of its financial services vertical.

The appointments also mark a strategy change in Paytm’s business models, taking a leaf out of investor and Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba’s playbook. These include monetisation of Paytm businesses through advertisements and serving the cloud requirements for small and medium businesses Paytm works with.

“Over the years, Paytm has built a large consumer and merchant base. Focusing on monetisation opportunities, we will have Praveen and Ankit build our advertising and cloud offerings for Indian businesses. Praveen has built the most formidable advertising business and Ankit comes with an understanding of SMB needs,” said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CEO of Paytm, in a statement issued by the company.

Flipkart

Walmart-owned Flipkart has promoted five senior executives as vice presidents.

The development was reported by The Economic Times, citing an internal email sent by Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy.

The letter named Chanakya Gupta, business head of Flipkart’s refurbished goods platform 2GUD, Saurabh Tandon, senior director of engineering at Flipkart fintech and payments group, senior directors Nishit Garg and Nandita Sinha and principal architect of engineering for Big Billion Days sale Regunath B.

The promotions are the first of a series coupled with additional stocks being issued by the company under the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) as part of its biannual performance assessment.

In May, the company had issued ESOPs worth $100 million to retain senior and mid-level talent.