Mastercard Invests In Pine Labs To Innovate Cashless Payments

Retail payment and hardware company Pine Labs has raised an undisclosed amount from global payments giant Mastercard.

With this funding, Pine Labs and Mastercard are expected to extend their partnership to facilitate rapid growth of convenient electronic payment options for consumers across India.

With a stronger collaboration, both the companies are planning to roll out an “extensive range of card and real-time payments-based instalment financing at checkout – in-store and online,” Pine Labs said, in its press release. In addition, both the companies will continue to innovate to make payment simpler and quicker for the customers.

“Together, the companies will offer a suite of value-added services, including Pine Labs’ end-to-end stored value solutions which will replace the paper ones now widely used by companies, retailers and people in South Asia and many other markets,” the statement added.

Pine Labs hasn’t disclosed any details or terms of the deals. However, an ET report published two days ago (January 22) noted that Pine Labs was in talks with Mastercard to raise funding as a part of a $300 Mn round, where New York-based Advent Capital would also participate.

The report also added that to make room for Mastercard and Advent Capital, Pine Lab’s biggest investor Sequoia Capital might have to partially exit the company, letting go off almost 15 to 25% shares. The US-based investment firm has been investing in Pine Labs since 2009 and owns a 68% stake in the company.

Mastercard and Pine Labs had partnered back in 2016 to innovate payment technology. Under the partnership, Pine Labs’ point of sale devices at 26,000 stores would support Matercard’s contactless payment instrument.

Founded in 1998 by Lokvir Kapoor, Pine Labs enables online and offline retail transactions. It claims to process $30 Bn payments per year. In its press release, Pine Labs also mentions that it serves close to 140K merchants across 450,000 network points. These merchants are from various sectors ranging from electronics, food & beverage, fashion, pharmacy, telecom and airlines.

Moreover, the company works with financial institutions and other partners from the fintech industry. Previously, Pine Labs collaborated with Google Pay to enable offline transactions through unified payments interface (UPI). With this, Google was estimated to have gained access to over 330K point-of-sale terminals spread across more than 3K towns in India.