Explained | Paytm Payments Bank meltdown

New Delhi: Son of a schoolteacher from Aligarh district in Uttar Pradesh, Vijay Shekhar Sharma was enamoured by Jack Ma-run Alibaba’s focus on smartphones rather than desktop computers, when he built a digital payments company that would let Indians pay for vegetables, pay utility bills or buy cinema tickets using their mobile phones.

Sharma, the poster boy of India’s fintech boom, also set out to build an Alipay-like mobile marketplace to go alongside the payments business, allowing businesses to sell goods from matchbox to iPhones online.

With fame came a set of controversies for arguably the most high-profile of a wave of Indian tech entrepreneurs.