Japanese Investment behemoth SoftBank will exit the boards of PolicyBazaar and Paytm. It is SoftBank’s usual strategy of leaving the boards of its companies that go public, said an exclusive report from Moneycontrol.
Munish Varma is SoftBank’s managing partner and he is stepping down from the Paytm and PolicyBazaar’s board.
Although the position will be exited, however, SoftBank will continue to hold stakes in both the companies and will continue to invest in them going forward.
Yashish Dahiya along with Alok Bansal and Avaneesh Nirja had incepted PolicyBazaar way back in 2008. PolicyBazaar.com was an online portal that helped people buy the right insurance policy. And Vijay Shekhar Sharma started the story of Paytm in 2010 which helped customers pay digitally for a seamless online transaction. Under its umbrella, it has Paytm and Paytm Payments Bank.
To date, close to $10 billion have been injected into Indian tech companies by SoftBank. Just recently in 2021 both Paytm and PolicyBazaar, SoftBank’s impressive portfolio companies have gone public.
This decision follows the stocks hitting hard in the last few months of both Paytm and PolicyBazaar.
In a consecutive set of events, Paytm Payments Bank has been denied access to add new customers to their servers as Vijay Shekhar Sharma is being held for violating the Storage of Payment System Data Law.
RBI in its routine annual scrutiny found that the Paytm Payments Bank servers were trading sensitive information with Chinese entities. These Chinese entities happen to have an indirect share in the company.
In a lash out on Twitter, Paytm Payments Bank tweeted, “It’s just a false alarm that Bloomberg has reported of any such trade-off with Chinese firms. We are very proud to be a domestic bank and we fully comply with RBI’s directives on data localization. The complete bank’s data is stationed inside India.”
As soon as RBI slapped a ban, the parent company of Paytm – One97 Communications’ share price came tumbling down, to a record dip on INR 614.80 at 1.30 pm on Tuesday
(WITH SIGNIFICANT INPUTS FROM MONEYCONTROL)
