Paytm Mall shuffles its team to focus on "Online-to-Offline" consumer business

As per a news source, Paytm Mall is restructuring its top- and mid-level executive teams. It is also speculated that the firm is also planning to focus on catering to its merchant ecosystem through B2B category and on offline-to-online consumer businesses.

The Alibaba Group and SoftBank backed Paytm Mall have moved Sudhanshu Jain, Chief Financial Officer, Paytm Bank, as the Financial Comptroller of the online business. The company has also roped in Bharti Balakrishnan, Senior Director with Alibaba Group, to lead certain unstructured categories including fashion, home and kitchen, while Varun Gupta, a three-plus-year veteran at the company, has been elevated to lead its groceries vertical. Sirinivas Mothey is now the firm’s Chief Marketing Officer.

In between this, Saurabh Vashishtha and Amit Bagaria, both Senior Vice Presidents leading critical functions such as marketing and customer acquisitions, have quit Paytm Mall.

The developments come at a time when there have been reports that Paytm is looking to scale down, or even completely exit its consumer-facing business, and will, going forward, focus more on the wholesale and O2O (online-to-offline) segments, due to a combination of mounting losses and inability to close the gap with market leaders.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder of Paytm, has denied that the firm was considering options to exit B2C business, but disclosed that Paytm Mall will increasingly focus on its O2O business, going forward. Majority of the business is expected to come from O2O (delivery from local store), 15% wholesale and 35% from warehoused items. The Mall platform expects to hit $2 billion in gross merchandise sales this year.

Raghu Chakravarthi has joined the retailer from leading online grocery retailer BigBasket to build the company’s O2O tech stack.