PayPal's shopping spree continues as the US behemoth makes its third investment in a fortnight, joining with Singapore's Temasek to pay $125 million for a minority stake in Indian digital retail payments platform Pine Labs.
The deal comes in the wake of PayPal's recent agreements to buy Sweden's iZettle for $2.2 billion and AI-based merchant marketing outfit Jetlore.
New Delhi-based Pine Labs provides merchants with cloud-based POS software that lets them accept cards, as well as QR-code-based payments and other unified payments interface (UPI)-based offerings.
The firm processes 450 million transactions, worth US$15 billion, a year and is used by over 65,000 merchants, claiming 15% of India's cashless transactions in physical stores.
With Indian authorities making a concerted effort to push digital payments through policies such as demonetisation and the introduction of UPI, PayPal and Temasek are betting that Pine Labs has huge potential.
PayPal says that its product expertise will help Pine Labs as it builds up its product and services suite, while Temasek will tap its deep network across Asia to support the Indian firm's regional expansion plans.
Lokvir Kapoor, founder, Pine Labs, says: "We’re teaming up with Temasek and PayPal at a time when the Indian payments market is at an inflexion point. We are a leader in the offline payments space, a position that is critical in enabling the ecosystem of online payment products. The investments will help us move a step closer to our vision for building a world-class merchant-centric payments ecosystem."