FinTech news in Paytm category

Onboarding merchants to accept the UPI payments in the foreign markets will be a key test for India’s NPCI, because without merchants, users on PhonePe and other Indian UPI payments apps won’t be able to make any payments. PhonePe’s step is also in line with the vision of NPCI, the body that oversees the UPI payments, which believes that within this year Indians in many foreign cities including Dubai will not need to use any other payment method, according to one of the fintech execs. Bengaluru-headquartered fintech giant PhonePe said on Tuesday that it extending support for UPI international payments in the UAE, Singapore, Mauritius, Nepal and Bhutan. Ideally, the acquiring side UPI players will need to partner with local payments processor or aggregators that can extend support for UPI at scale among the local merchants.

PhonePe, which is valued at $12 billion, has projected a revenue of $325 million in the calendar year 2022 and $504 million in 2023, according to a valuation report prepared by the auditing firm KPMG and filed by PhonePe. A concern for PhonePe’s growth was Indian regulators enforcing a market cap check on each player, but the deadline for the new guidelines was extended last month and now won’t come into effect until 2025, giving PhonePe another two years of fast-growth. The nine-month financials marks a jump from the $201.6 million revenue that the Bengaluru-headquartered generated in the 12-month period ending in financial year March last year. The startup, backed by Walmart, doesn’t expect to turn EBIDTA positive, a key profitability metric, until the calendar year 2025, KMPG wrote in its valuation report.

UPI Lite, which was first proposed earlier this year, processes payments below 200 Indian rupees ($2.5) and is aimed at lowering the burden on banks’ infrastructure, executives said at a conference Tuesday. He said a lighter version of the payments system, called UPI Lite, is now live in the country with eight banks including HDFC, SBI and Kotak. The payments network, which was built by a coalition of banks, is India’s attempt to challenge card companies in an open market, bring hundreds of millions of people into the fold of digital payments and curb the proliferation of corruption. On Tuesday, Das said two new offerings of UPI — one expands its usercase while the other will helps it continue to scale — have gone live.

Payments giants and fintech startups in India on Saturday requested the central bank to treat widely used prepaid payment instruments on par with bank accounts for customers who have undertaken certain verifications, days after the monetary authority signalled industry-wide crackdown. The Payments Council of India, a unit of influential industry body IAMAI, said in a \[…\]

The Reserve Bank of India has informed dozens of fintech startups that it is barring the practice of loading non-bank prepaid payment instruments (PPIs) — prepaid cards, for instance — using credit lines, in a move that has prompted panic among — and existential threat to — many fintech startups and caused some to compare the decision to China’s crackdown on financial services firm last year.

Bloomberg reported this afternoon that Paytm digital bank was barred from adding new customers because it violated India’s rules by allowing data to be shared with China-based entities that indirectly owned a stake in Paytm Payments Bank.

The startup, valued at $2.85 billion and backed by Tiger Global and Ribbit Capital, said on Wednesday its board members had agreed to Grover request to take a voluntary leave of absence from the startup until the end of March. Grover in the reported email was concerned about the additional time Sequoia Capital India, the most prolific venture capital firm in the South Asian market, was taking in giving a term sheet to the startup. The venture capital firm was not comfortable with Grover selling millions of dollars’ worth of shares in a secondary transaction in the startup’s Series B, the years-old email said, according to the newspaper. Recording of a phone call surfaced and went viral on social media earlier this month in which Grover appeared to have abused and threatened a staff of Kotak Mahindra Bank for refusing him financing to buy shares in online fashion startup Nykaa’s IPO.

Tiger Global, which has made over 50 investments in India this year, is currently conducting due diligence to back an additional nine startups in the country, according to a person familiar with the matter.