Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Entrepreneur

Never before has India looked up to a start-up to unlock financial inclusion, especially in tier-2 cities and smaller towns. An early adopter of new-age digital payment infrastructure, Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s Paytm was the hero in the immediate aftermath of demonetisation, with more transactions in a day than the combined average daily usage of credit and debit cards in India.

“Vijay is the most open and transparent unicorn startup CEO in India. He has an enormous ability to act boldly and be a disrupter” – Sharad Sharma, co-founder, Indian Software Product Industry Round Table

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The scale of Sharma’s ambition not only made him India’s youngest billionaire, it also put him on Time magazine’s list of the world’s most influential people, the only Indian besides Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The 150 million wallets on the Paytm platform are just the beginning, Sharma keeps saying. His company is set to offer payment-bank services and plans to invest Rs 10,000 in the financial sector over the next three years.

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