How Airtel Payments Bank Splits Recruitment and Payroll by Role
Channelplay recruits for two kinds of roles at Airtel Payments Bank: the head office and the field sales team. Only the field team is on our payroll. Even there, the bank keeps the numbers that decide pay: it shares attendance and prepares the payout list itself, and we run payroll from that list.
A brand that outsources its staff has one call to make: hand the agency the hiring, the payroll, or both. The bank makes that call one role at a time, and it's a split worth copying.
Who recruits and who pays, role by role
Airtel Payments Bank is Bharti Airtel's payments bank, launched in January 2017. Besides accounts and payments, it offers FASTag and an NCMC card, and it works through a network of retailers and merchants. So next to its head-office team, it needs people in the field: with merchants and distributors, and at toll plazas and metro stations.
| Roles | What they do | What Channelplay does | What the bank keeps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Head office: MIS analysts, HR, customer support | The bank's corporate functions | Shares resumes, sources finalists and supports the recruitment | Pays them through its own payroll team |
| Territory Sales Managers | Manage team leads and promoters | Recruits, issues offer letters and runs payroll | Shares attendance and prepares the payout list |
| Team leads | Manage promoters | Recruits, issues offer letters and runs payroll | Shares attendance and prepares the payout list |
| Promoters | Field sales and merchant activities | Recruits, issues offer letters and runs payroll | Shares attendance and prepares the payout list |
| Merchant and distributor promoters | Promoter-type field roles | Recruits, issues offer letters and runs payroll | Shares attendance and prepares the payout list |
| Sales Merchant Executives | Target-based roles at toll plazas and metro stations, on toll-related work | Recruits, issues offer letters and runs payroll | Shares attendance and prepares the payout list |
Why head-office pay stays with the bank
For head-office roles, our job is the shortlist: we share resumes, source finalists and support the recruitment. The bank's own payroll team pays the people it hires. Pay at CXO, sales and manager level can include performance-linked incentives, and the bank's employee and payroll team handles and pays those too.
We'd set it up the same way. Incentive pay is where a company's own plans live. When the team that designs a plan also pays it, there's no handover in between, and nobody outside the bank needs to see how senior pay is built. Recruiting is a separate job, and the bank can use our reach to find candidates without giving up any of that.
Why the bank keeps the payout list for field roles
On the field side, the bank's list is where our work starts. We don't build it. We process payroll from it once it arrives, and the payroll cycle isn't fixed: it depends on the bank.
That matters most for the Sales Merchant Executives, who work to targets. The payout list is the bank's own record of what each person has earned. If an agency worked those figures out for itself, there would be two versions of the same number, and every gap between them would become an argument. With one list, the bank decides what each person earns, and our job is to pay it as the list says.
There's a legal reason as well. Under India's Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, in force since 21 November 2025, a contractor pays contract workers' wages by bank transfer or another electronic mode and tells the principal employer (the brand) electronically how much it paid. If the contractor pays late or short, the principal employer has to pay the balance and recover it from the contractor. So where those rules apply, a brand still answers for its field team's pay after it hands over payroll. A payout list the brand prepared itself is the figure it can check every reported payment against. The same Code also says a manpower supply contractor that has employed 50 or more contract workers on any day of the past twelve months may supply them only under a licence, so ask to see your agency's licence before it takes over a field team.
How we hire the field team
Offer letters come from one standard format. Once a new hire's name, email ID, phone number and the other required details are entered, the letter is generated automatically, and our key account manager issues it. Nobody retypes a letter for each joiner. From then on, that same manager handles employee escalations on the account.
To bring in more resumes, the account runs a referral program. Whoever refers a candidate is rewarded, but only once the person they referred has stayed in the job for a set period. It pays for hires who stay, not for names on a list. The same Code also bars a contractor from charging contract workers any fee or commission, directly or indirectly.
We recruit every level of the field chain, from Territory Sales Managers down to promoters, so the managers and the people they lead come in through the same hiring process.
Which of your roles to hand over
Any brand with a head office and a field team can copy the split:
- Keep the pay numbers yourself, for every role. Attendance and the payout list are your records. An agency should pay from them, not produce them, and you can check what it reports paying against them.
- Where pay carries your own incentive plans, hand over the hiring, not the payroll. Let the agency find finalists, and let the team that designs the incentives pay them.
- For field roles, hand over both. Recruiting, offer letters, payroll and your field staff's questions then sit with one partner.
To see how we run this for other brands, read about our recruitment and payroll outsourcing services, our guide to payroll outsourcing services and how a full recruitment process runs. For another payments client, see how we run field merchant onboarding for Amazon Pay.
