When India Killed the 1,000-Rupee Note, This Startup Got Busy

The founder and chief executive of India's largest digital payments company has barely slept and is nursing a head cold. Having just arrived at Paytm's office, Vijay Shekhar Sharma discovers the coffee machine is broken. No time to send out for java. He settles for tea and plunges into a vortex of meetings—parsing a government circular on mobile swipe services, war-gaming a team member’s appointment with the Central Bank the next day and viewing new app designs. It’s barely an hour into the workday.

Sharma is pushing himself to extremes because he knows this is a pivotal moment for Paytm (which rhymes with ATM). Two months ago, with no warning, the Indian government said it was scrapping 500- and 1,000-rupee banknotes, in a stroke excising four-fifths of the nation's paper money. The move was designed to curb endemic corruption. But it also had the effect of accelerating India's transition to digital payments, and the mobile wallet market is expected to explode to 300 billion rupees ($4.4 billion) by 2022 from 1.54 billion rupees last year, according to a forecast by trade body Assocham and researcher RNCOS.