11 payments banks to open up 1,500 jobs with up to Rs 1.50 crore salaries

These entities will have to start operations within 18 months of getting inprinciple approval from the Reserve Bank of India. They will be allowed to do limited banking services - for instance, they can accept deposits, offer payments and remittance services, issue debit cards and act as agents for commercial banks, but can't lend. The central bank issued the permits in August.

Five of the licence holders - Cholamandalam, Department of Posts, National Securities Depository, Tech Mahindra and Dilip Shanghvi of Sun Pharma - are yet to hire the chief executives for the payments backs.

As per estimates by Vito India, a domestic executive search firm specialising in financial services hiring, around 150 senior executives will be hired among these 11 entities. They are also expected to recruit about 370 mid-level executives and more than a 1,000 junior-level staff in the next coming months.

Some of the functions for which these firms need talent include product, sales and distribution, merchant acquisition, strategic alliances, operations, and regulatory and compliance. For senior executives in these functions, salaries can range anywhere between Rs 50 lakh and Rs 75 lakh.

"We expect a spike in demand for talent from liability product teams of transaction banking; digital product teams of retail banks or ecommerce platforms; and merchant acquisitions, sales & distribution talent from insurance companies retail banking and FMCG companies" said Ayesha D'Souza, head of global banking and markets at Vito India, which has been hired for search assignments by some of these payment banks. "Salary for CXOs (CEOs and other management-level executives) is in the range of Rs 1-1.5 crore while for a level below it is around Rs 70 lakh to Rs 1 crore," said Kalyani Shastry, associate director at RGF Executive Search.

"There are two things mainly bothering the management of payment banks - one is technology and the other is the governance and risk piece. A significant thrust of the hiring is on the technology piece and hiring is happening from different parts of the ecosystem, with lot of talent coming from the cash management side of banks and some from FMCG and other sectors," Shastry said.

Those who have got the approval include Airtel M Commerce Services, Fino Paytech, Reliance Industries, Paytm, Vodafone M Pesa and the Aditya Birla Group. The Birla group's payments bank has already got its team in place. "We have our people in place ... we look for banking, consumer and technology-oriented people," said Santrupt Misra, director, global HR & CEO, carbon black business, at the group. The entities are looking for talent internationally as well, including from places such as Singapore and Silicon Valley where people have worked with disruptive products, said K Sudarshan, managing partner and co-founder, EMA Partners.

"Talent is being hired from across the ecosystem with a big thrust on technology and a lot of product and strategy people coming from companies in the Silicon Valley," he said. In terms of people, the payments banks are looking for very different types of talent from what the traditional banks would look at, including people with technology expertise, product thinking and innovation, and also people who understand markets beyond large urban areas.

"Talent scarcity will be seen especially in product roles, regulatory & compliance roles, business solution teams where the pool will emanate from a select few banks, therefore pushing up both demand and compensation. This will further lead to some musical chairs in the banking industry early next year, once mid-senior level talent gets poached by these six to eight players" said Vito's D'souza.

With the government pushing for these payments banks to ensure that unbanked masses are brought into the formal banking fold, more such licences can be expected in the future. Of the total 41 applicants who had applied for the licence, only 11 were awarded a permit for the time being.

Calling it a significant and important step from the RBI, finance minister Arun Jaitley had said he expected payments banks to reach out to people in rural areas. "Payments bank will ensure more money comes into banking system. Various banks are looking at increasing their rural reach, including big banks like SBI. Payments banks will help them realise this," Jaitley had said.

Source:-The Economic Times