SUMMARY
• Zopper’s CEO Neeraj Jain and the engineering leadership team has become a part of the PhonePe’s team
• The move has been taken with the aim of enhancing the adoption of digital payments for merchants
• The acquisition will help PhonePe to ramp up its offline business
Flipkart’s digital payment subsidiary PhonePe has acquired Zopper Retail – a hyperlocal Point of Sale (POS) platform for small and medium businesses. The acquisition is a part of the company’s strategy to aggressively ramp up its offline business.
Zopper’s CEO Neeraj Jain and the engineering leadership team has joined the team of PhonePe after the acquisition.
Sameer Nigam, CEO, PhonePe, said, “Zopper has a very strong technology and innovation DNA, and Neeraj and team are also a great culture fit for PhonePe. Zopper Retail is specifically designed to meet the needs of millions of small retailers in India, and their strategy ties in very well with our overall vision of making digital payments universally accepted across the country.”
The combination of value-added services being provided by these companies are expected to greatly enhance the adoption of digital payments for merchants.
Neeraj Jain, CEO, Zopper, said, “By joining forces we strengthen our commitment of using technology for simplifying our merchant’s billing, payments and inventory management systems.”
The company currently claims to have a network of three lakh offline and online merchant outlets covering food, travel, groceries, movie tickets, etc.
The company claims to have crossed the 100 Mn user mark and the $20 Bn annual TPV run rate in May 2018. It has recently launched mini-apps on its platforms allowing users to book Ola rides, pay for Redbus tickets and avail Goibibo Hotel services from inside the PhonePe application directly.
PhonePe’s Bet On POS And Its Offline Thrust
Flipkart owned digital payments app is aiming to give a bigger thrust to its offline payments strategy in order to garner a larger share of the transactions from its offline business than online by the end of the year.
The digital payment arm of Flipkart is banking on the strategy of deploying its own PoS payment terminals at small merchant locations as well as partnering with major merchant chains at the national level to enable PhonePe-based payments at its outlets.
With tie-ups, the Bengaluru based startup hopes to capture a large share of the offline payments market. Earlier, PhonePe had launched the POS device to serve the needs of the small merchants.
Prior to this, PhonePe had joined hands with Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. had enabled its POS devices for IOCL customers using UPI, Credit and Debit cards, PhonePe Wallet, and other external wallets like JIO money and Freecharge for their fuel purchases.
