PayPal to acquire Honey Science

PayPal Holdings Inc. will acquire Honey Science Corp. for about $4 Billion, it’s largest-ever acquisition, adding a startup that amasses valuable data on consumer buying habits and doles out coupons for online bargains.

About 17 million people use Honey apps or web browser extensions to find discounts at online shopping sites. The start-up was profitable in 2018. Shares of the payments giant were little changed in extended trading. Honey is valued at almost twice what PayPal paid for its next-largest deal, iZettle, the Swedish provider of small-business services it purchased in 2018 and marks the first major acquisition this year.

Honey, which was founded in 2012, will keep its base in Los Angeles, and the founders will continue to run the business. The company’s services include a browser extension that automatically applies coupons at e-commerce sites. Honey’s capabilities will give customers better shopping experience, and help merchants drive sales, partly with more timely and personalized offers.

PayPal to buy Simility

Digital Payments platform PayPal Holdings Inc. signed a deal to acquire Palo Alto based Simility Inc., fraud prevention and risk management platform, for $120 Million in cash. The acquisition will allow PayPal to roll out new fraud prevention features to merchants.

Features such as fraudulent payment activity prevention, risk management and transaction verification will soon be introduced on the merchant’s online dashboard. PayPal has been at the forefront of developing innovative fraud prevention and risk management solutions for nearly 20 years and now merchants will be able to configure those solutions to manage the unique complexities of their businesses.

Simility, which was founded in 2014, has raised more than $20 million till date from Accel Partners and California-based investors, including Trinity Ventures and The Valley Fund. It caters to clients in banking and financial services, online marketplaces and classifieds, payment services providers, and e-commerce among others.

PayPal, which had launched its domestic operations in India in November 2017, offers payments products to both consumers and businesses. It also made an investment in Noida-based digital retail payment platform Pine Labs in May this year in a $125 million round.

Citrus Payments acquires Zwitch

Citrus Payments Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which operates an online checkout and payment solution Citrus Pay, has acquired Bengaluru based payment platform Zwitch, run by iZwipe Payment Technologies. Citrus Pay is a fintech company focused on providing simplified payment experience to consumers.

Citrus partners with the airlines, utilities, marketplaces and 6000 other merchants to provide consumer payments and mobile banking services. After raising a Series A round of $2 Million in 2012 from Sequoia, the company grew to grab a $5.5 million Series B round from investors. Two days ago, it raised its Series C round of $25 Million led by Sequoia Capital and Ascent Capital.

The business has taken a stride forward and the recent investor backing pushed the envelope for Citrus Pay consumer business. With more than 15 Million users already using Citrus to transact online, Citrus ventured into the consumer payments space with the Citrus Cube app a personal bill management app that claims to see over 10 Million Transactions in a month.

Zwitch, a full stack payment platform enabling developers accept online and mobile payments, was founded in 2013. It claims to have over 1,000 merchants onboard and records daily transactions of about Rs 10 Lakh. This is the first acquisition by Citrus. Citrus competes with CCAvenue, ibibo group PayU, One97 Paytm Payments, ZaakPay and PayPal. 

PayPal bought Money Transfer service Xoom

PayPal has made a few significant acquisitions since 2013, including purchasing Paydiant and Braintree. Now, PayPal said it would buy digital money transfer provider Xoom Corp. for $890 Million as it muscles into a growing international remittance market and expand in countries like Mexico, India and China ahead of a spinoff from eBay Inc.

Xoom, which has 1.3 Million customers and a presence in 37 countries, allow users to transfer money via desktop, mobile phones and tablets. The acquisition would allow Xoom to expand into new markets with less execution risk. Xoom will operate as a separate service within PayPal after the completion of the deal.

PayPal faces increasing competition from rivals like Stripe and Square, which is popular with smaller businesses and Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay. Online commerce foe Amazon Inc. is also beginning to explore in store payments. The company is slated to separate from eBay this month and list as an Independent company.

PayPal has been pushing hard into mobile, where customers are more frequently making everyday purchases. The company has touted its peer-to-peer money transferring division Venmo, used primarily by smartphone touting millennial, and earlier this year bought app developer Paydiant.

PayPal buys Mobile Payment startup Paydiant

PayPal is an American international Digital wallet based e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders. PayPal is one of the world’s largest internet payment companies. The company operates as an acquirer, performing payment processing for online vendors, auction sites and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee.

The eBay payment unit plans to acquire Paydiant, a payments startup that licenses a technology platform used by big retail chains to create their own branded mobile wallet apps. PayPal will pay around $280 Million for the startup. Founded in 2010, Paydiant white label platform is used by Subway and other retailers and banks to add payment, loyalty, and digital coupon capabilities to their own apps. Its customer list also includes MCX, a consortium of big box retailers led by Walmart that says it will launch its mobile wallet app this year.

Competition in the mobile wallet sector is heating up with the launch of Apple Pay, Samsung offering Samsung Pay beginning this summer and Google teaming up with Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile to have its Google Wallet payment service built into Android phones sold by those carriers. EBay has been planning to spin off its PayPal payment business in the second half of this year.

In 2013, PayPal had acquired mobile payment service Venmo. PayPal has also announced that its Here card reader for mobile payments will soon support the wireless payment technology. The NFC enabled version of Here will pair with phones via Bluetooth, and supports traditional chip and PIN methods. The new NFC enabled PayPal Here Chip and PIN card reader, which will start rolling out in the UK and Australia this summer, and in the US later this year.