India’s largest e-commerce firm
Flipkart has bought payment services start-up FX Mart Pvt. Ltd, which holds a
prepaid wallet license, so as to add a payment service on its platform and on
that of its unit Myntra. Singapore registered Flipkart Payments Pvt. Ltd, paid
Rs. 45.4 crore for a majority stake in FX Mart and two senior Flipkart
executives also joined the board of FX Mart.
FX Mart owns a coveted prepaid
license issued by Reserve Bank of India. The license will allow Flipkart to
offer a digital wallet on its app and avoid paying a cut to external wallet
providers. The license can also potentially help Flipkart increase the
proportion of cashless transactions. A majority of shoppers still prefer paying
cash for online purchases, which creates operational headaches for e-commerce
companies.
With FX Mart License, Flipkart which
has been a laggard in payments plans to launch a payment service on its app as
well as Myntra within the next three months. The company also plans to offer
the payment service on third party sites and apps later. The current market
leader is Paytm followed by a host of smaller firms such as Oxigen Services
India Pvt. Ltd and One MobiKwik Systems Pvt. Ltd.
India has several others payment
services start-ups including Citrus Payments Solutions Pvt. Ltd, PayU Payments
Pvt. Ltd, CCAvenue and Zaakpay. FX Mart offers electronic payments, foreign
exchange and travel services. FX Mart is Flipkart second acquisition in digital
payments. It bought another payments start-up NGPay last year.
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