MasterCard invests India payments player Pine Labs

“Smart devices are transforming how people shop. With this partnership, we’re continuing to build innovative solutions and provide people with new ways to pay right at their fingertips,” Ari Sarker, a co-president for Asia Pacific at Mastercard, said in a statement. “By joining forces with Pine Labs, we are reinforcing our strategy to deliver choice to consumers and to be the partner of choice for our customers in South Asia and around the world.”

Pine Labs said the investment would support the delivery of a range of card and real-time services for merchants and customers. The two companies will focus on payments-based installment financing at the point of checkout, both in-store and online. This effort aims to exploit an Indian installment-based payments market for consumer goods that is expected to expand from $16.9 billion in 2021 to $52.5 billion in 2025.

Founded in 1998, Pine Labs offers a cloud-based payments platform that allows merchants in India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East otherwise dependent on traditional point-of-sale terminals to accept payments via methods including online wallets, QR codes, and electronic gift cards, as well as credit and debit cards.  It claims to process $30 billion of payments a year and serve 140,000 merchants across about 450,000 network points.

Last year, the company agreed to acquire Amazon-backed gift card technology provider Qwikcilver in 2019 for $110 million. It received $180 million in 2018 from Temasek, PayPal, Sequoia, Madison India Capital, and Actis Capital, which had previously led a $82 million round alongside US-based private equity firm Altimeter Capital. Belgium-based Sofina is also an investor.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Expansion
• Consumer
• Financials
• Technology
• India
• e-commerce
• Financial Services