Paytm Says It Didn’t Share User Data With Investors

Paytm, a digital payment company out of India, said Thursday (July 26) that it didn’t share user data with investors or any foreign entities just one day after a member of Parliament, Narendra Jadhav, argued Alibaba’s stake in the company was a “very serious threat to [India’s] national security.”

According to a report in BGR, Paytm parent company One97 Communications said it never shares user data with any third parties, investors, foreign countries or anyone outside the company. “Paytm is an Indian owned, controlled and domiciled company. We do not share user data with our investors or any foreign entity,” the company spokesperson said in an emailed statement to BGR.

Jadhav alleged that Alibaba applied for a non-banking finance company license in India via Paytm to “possibly capture a large chunk of [its] domestic lending market by resorting to predatory pricing and capital dumping.” He went on to say that “if Chinese multinationals are allowed to dominate the Indian financial services sector, they will gain access to private and financial data of millions of individuals and corporates. This could inevitably expose India to a serious geopolitical risk and make our country vulnerable to external influence, thereby compromising national security.”

Paytm denied the claims and told BGR it ensures the security of users’ data by storing all of the information locally in India. “Our data is processed and stored locally in India with no access provided to any external party. We are the biggest champions of data sovereignty with complete ownership in India and only by Indian consumers,” it said.

The controversy comes at a time when business for Paytm is booming. The company reportedly breached $4 billion in monthly gross transaction value. According to a report in Livemint, the number of transactions also hit 1.3 billion in the June ending quarter.

“Paytm has been witnessing [a] tremendous increase in adoption of digital payments in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, which constitutes 50 percent of its total user base. This has helped the company to achieve an annual run rate of five billion transactions and $50 billion in GTV (gross transaction value),” Paytm said in a statement.