Amazon invests Rs 225 cr in India digital payments arm to scale up presence

Amazon Pay got the capital infusion in March by allotting 22.5 crore equity shares

USA’s Amazon has invested Rs 225 crore in its Indian digital payments business, buttressing its competition with Walmart-owned PhonePe, Alibaba-backed Paytm, and Google's mobile payment service Google Pay in the co.

The funding for Amazon Pay came from Singapore-based Amazon Corporate Holdings Private Limited and Mauritius-based entity Amazon.com. Limited Company, according to regulatory documents sourced by business intelligence platform Tofler.

Amazon Pay got the capital infusion on March 01, by allotting 22.5 crore equity shares of Rs 10 each.

Last October, ahead of the festive season, Amazon had invested Rs 700 crore in Amazon Pay.

Digital payments in India will rise fivefold to reach $1 trillion by 2023, led by the growth in mobile payments, according to a report by financial services company Credit Suisse.

PhonePe and Google Pay have the lion’s share of the unified payments interface (UPI) market. PhonePe did 968 million transactions in January whereas Google Pay processed 853 million payments. Paytm reportedly did about 281 million payments on UPI whereas Amazon Pay did 46 million.

Amazon Pay is rapidly scaling up its presence in the India market as due to the coronavirus pandemic consumers have been heavily dependent on e-commerce to purchase everything from essential goods to holiday gifts. Amazon is eyeing to tap multiple sectors in the country ranging from insurance, wealth management to credit through Amazon Pay. The Jeff Bezos-led firm is also making deeper inroads in India's booming digital payments market.

Amazon Pay enables customers to transact from a variety of use cases like electricity, water and gas bill payments, DTH and mobile recharge. It recently partnered with ride-hailing firm Uber for installing plastic screens in 40,000 Uber Autos (auto-rickshaws) for enhancing the safety of riders and drivers. This would be done across seven cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune and Jaipur. In October 2020, in a global first, Amazon Pay and Uber had announced an association allowing Uber riders to make contactless, cashless payments using Amazon Pay.

Mahendra Nerurkar, CEO of Amazon Pay, said recently that driven by customers’ need for hygienic, socially distant and secure payments transactions for everyday needs, the firm has witnessed multifold growth in the adoption of contactless payments last year.