Pine Labs Forays Into Online Payments Service Called "Plural"

IPO-bound merchant commerce platform Pine Labs has entered into the online payments space with Plural

SUMMARY

The payment platform (named as Plural) comes shortly after Pine Labs acquired Southeast Asia’s fintech startup Fave for $45 Mn to strengthen its digital payments solutions in India and foreign countries

The payment gateway will target online stores, big ecommerce companies, large-scale government institutions, and large financial services companies, including edtech, subscription billers and B2C

The online payments market is currently dominated by BillDesk, Razorpay, PayU, Paytm others

IPO-bound merchant commerce platform Pine Labs has entered into the online payments space with Plural.

The payment platform comes shortly after Pine Labs acquired Southeast Asia’s fintech startup Fave for $45 Mn to strengthen its digital payments solutions in India as well as in foreign countries.

The startup launched three products:

Plural Gateway: Allowing payment acceptance via 100+ modes of payment which is also equipped to process Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) transactions
Plural Checkout: Mobile SDK (Software Development Kit) intended to boost payment gateway performance for Android and iOS users
Plural Console: A payment orchestration platform (POP) to offer a single tech framework to trigger transactions via multiple payment gateways

“The platform has been built for scale from day one. Given reliability and security at its core, an extra effort has been coded to build a modern cloud-native microservices-based architecture, which can serve industry best standards and metrics, through cloud computing platform has been designed to elastically scale to handle sudden spikes in traffic,” Pine Labs’ Tanya Naik, head of the online and omnichannel business said.

Former Director-Payments, India and Cross Border Markets at PayPal, Naik joined PineLabs last year.

Founded in 1998 by Lokvir Kapoor and currently headed by Amrish Rau, Pine Labs enables large and mid-sized businesses in Asia and the Middle East to accept digital payments. The startup provides merchant commerce solutions, including enterprise automation systems such as customer relationship management and inventory management.

Pine Labs’ cloud-based platform claims to have 140K+ merchants, 3.5 lakh PoS terminals across 3,700 cities and towns in India and Malaysia. More than 15 major banks, seven financial institutions and more than 100 brands are a part of Pine Labs’ platform that processes payments worth $30 Bn every year.

According to the company, Plural which competes with platforms such as BillDesk, Razorpay, PayU, and Atom Technologies, will help merchants transition from offline to online. The payment gateway will target online stores, big ecommerce companies, large-scale government institutions, and large financial services companies.

“Our strategy has been to start with merchants who are already working with us. We’re deeply integrated with them in the offline world. The other category is government, edtech, subscription billers and B2C,” Naik added.

The IPO-bound startup is targeting $25 Bn annual payment volumes (APV) processed on its online payments platform Plural in the next 18 months. Currently, it processes about $30 Bn annual payment volume in the offline space.

With a proposed public listing on NASDAQ, Pine Labs will be the fourth Indian digital payment startup going public along with Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s Paytm and Bipin Preet Singh’s MobiKwik and Fino Payments Bank.

Paytm has filed its draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) of INR 16,600 Cr whereas MobiKwik will be raising INR 1,900 Cr through the public market in the coming months. Fino Payment also recently received market regulator SEBI’s approval for its INR 1,300 Cr IPO.