B2B payment solution provider Stripe tiptoes into Indian markets

Stripe has roped in former Amazon India executive Anand Balaji to push its business in the country

Global payment solution provider Stripe has begun enrolling Indian firms to use its platform and is looking to position itself as a serious player in the highly competitive low-margin business dominated currently by Naspers-owned PayU.  

Stripe, which has roped in former Amazon India executive Anand Balaji, has opened up beta opportunity invitation to select companies across the country.

“Today, we’re starting an invite-only beta for Stripe in India with a small group of companies. These businesses will help us test our platform in the Indian market and provide feedback on features that we’ll need to build to support all Indian businesses looking to accept online payments and run their companies on Stripe,” said Anand Balaji, India head of the San Franscisco based company in a blog post on Tuesday

In the past year since India’s massive demonetisation and digitisation drive, large numbers of players have entered the payments market both for B2C and B2B offerings. The market is crowded with both local players and global firms such as Paypal and PayU looking to capture a slice of transactions of the $50 billion B2B payments market

A joint report by Google & Boston Consulting Group (BCG) states, the total payments conducted via digital payment instruments will reach $500 billion by 2020.

The B2B payments market is currently dominated by PayU which posted over Rs 404 crore revenue in FY17. The Naspers backed company has also launched UPI based payment services that helped it clock over $1 billion worth of transactions during the same period.

PayU had recently expressed plans to push almost 80 per cent of the business through B2B payments via an almost 3,50,000 strong merchant base. India is PayU's fastest growing market, representing 41 per cent of the total payment volumes and growing payment volumes by 120 per cent year-on-year, the firm said last month.

“India is uniquely positioned to move more commerce online; In just the past two years, the percentage of India’s population connected to the internet has more than doubled to 500 million users,” said Balaji of Stripe.

Like their global counterparts Google and Paypal, Stripe will also focus on India-specific offerings and over 51 million small and medium businesses that are the next big target for payment solution providers. Stripe has businesses across 25 countries and will most likely start with UPI based services here.

A recent HDFC Bank report noted that cross border B2B payments and B2B e-commerce among others will help to push B2B digital transactions faster than B2C digital transactions in India.