Infibeam Invests In Payments Company To Expand To ‘Offline’ Market

Infibeam Avenues Ltd. which runs payments processing services CCAvenue said it had made a strategic investment in Mumbai-based Instant Global Paytech Private Ltd (IGPL) to build a next-generation payment technology platform for offline merchants & retailers transactions in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

The company did not disclose the terms of the deal, but in a news release said IGPL would use part of the funds to acquire customers and merchants. The rest of the investment will be invested in technology and to strengthen the team, it said.

IGPL has developed technologies to enable merchants and retailers to offer digital solutions to the largely cash transacting customers, this will open new payment options for consumers who want to shop and pay offline, Infibeam said.

“Estimated 90% of the transactions in the country are still cash-based and there are over 700 Mn people who fall into the category of “unbanked” and “underbanked” categories,” Infibeam said.

Infibeam – one of India’s first publicly listed ecommerce company – offers multi-channel payment processing services to an estimated over 70% of India’s retail e-merchants. The company said it has onboarded 100 K merchants on to its platform till now.

To increase market share the Company launched BiIIAvenue, an inter-operable digital bill payments platform, in November 2017.

Infibeam claimed that it had processed 55.8 Mn transactions in the first half of FY2019. At present, it competes with players such as PayU, Billdesk, Razorpay, Instamojo, among others.