MAM
Martin Sorrell bullish on India
MUMBAI: WPP chief executive officer Martin Sorrell is bullish about India’s economy. He believes the GST switchover pangs and demonetisation were only temporary hiccups.
Lauding India’s growth rate, Sorrell mentioned that India continued to remain among the fastest growing economies of the world, the Economic Times reported. When one had legislative change which brought about significant social change, it would lead to disruption. That was short-term pain for long-term gain, he said.
Sorrell, who was in India yesterday to attend the company’s first board meeting, announced the appointment of CVL Srinivas as the new country head. He also hinted that GroupM, which is a part of WPP network, was seek good acquisitions.
Sorrell said he did not believe internet companies such as Facebook and Google were particularly technology companies. They were media companies but took the position publicly as technology companies, which was wrong. He also shared that Facebook hired 4000 employees for its editorial content and social media companies should take responsibility of the content they put out.
He said he believed the technology companies had to take responsibility of their contents appearing on extremist sites or whatever happened to be — about consumer brands, safety, about transparency, about fraud, about bots, about fake news, all those issues, he added.
About characterising what the world was beyond India, he said, it was not growing at six per cent or 5.7 per cent. People would give their eye, teeth, they would cut off their limbs to grow at that sort of rate. The world, he said, was growing at around three to four per cent.
The UK would be lucky if it grew at a couple of percents. In the US, President Trump would like to see the growth at four per cent, he concluded.
Brands
Reserve Bank of India cancels Paytm Payments Bank licence
Central bank cites compliance failures; curbs tighten as wind-up looms
MUMBAI: India’s banking watchdog delivered its sharpest blow yet to Paytm Payments Bank, cancelling its licence and effectively ending its ability to operate as a bank under the law.
The Reserve Bank of India said the entity can no longer conduct banking business under the Banking Regulation Act, citing concerns that its affairs were not being run in the interest of depositors or the public and that it had failed to meet licence conditions.
The move escalates a crackdown that has been building for months. The bank had already been barred from onboarding new customers since March 11, 2022, and later faced restrictions on deposits, credit and wallet top-ups. In January 2024, the central bank ordered it to stop accepting fresh deposits, pointing to persistent non-compliance, including lapses in customer due diligence, use of funds and technology systems.
Operationally, the bank is now on a tight leash. It may process withdrawals of existing deposits and facilitate loan referrals through banking correspondents, but it cannot take fresh deposits.
The central bank said it would apply to the high court to wind up the bank.
Paytm sought to ringfence the fallout. In a regulatory filing, it said the licence cancellation applies to Paytm Payments Bank Limited, a separate entity, and should not be attributed to One 97 Communications. It added that there is no exposure or material business arrangement with the bank and that it operates independently, without Paytm’s board or management involvement.
“As informed earlier, Paytm (One 97 Communications Limited) and its services, which have been operating without interruption, will continue to operate uninterrupted. These include the Paytm app, Paytm UPI, Paytm Gold and all other services offered by its subsidiaries and associated companies,” the company said.
The distinction may reassure users of the app ecosystem, but the regulator’s verdict is unequivocal. After years of warnings, caps and curbs, the payments bank experiment at Paytm is being shut down—decisively, and with little room left to manoeuvre.
