WhatsApp hires Amazon Pay’s Mahatme to lead India payments: sources

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As a director, Mahatme oversaw a team of senior product, engineering and business development leaders at Amazon Pay, his LinkedIn profile shows

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WhatsApp has hired a top Amazon executive to head its payments business in India, two sources told Reuters, as the messenger service gears up to expand in the booming sector.

Manesh Mahatme, who has worked at Amazon Pay for nearly seven years, is due to join WhatsApp’s payment service soon, one of the sources said on Friday.

WhatsApp and Amazon Pay were not immediately available for comment. Mahatme declined to comment.

With more than 500 million users, WhatsApp counts India as its biggest market, where it is the newest entrant in India’s digital payments sector, which PwC and Indian industry body ASSOCHAM say is set to be worth $135 billion by 2023.

WhatsApp last year received a much-delayed approval for the launch of its payments system in India, but so far its rollout has been capped by regulators at 20 million users.

But it has big ambitions and a deal by Facebook last year to invest $5.7 billion in billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms digital unit, will allow WhatsApp to offer payments services to millions of mom-and-pop stores.

Also Read | WhatsApp Payment | How to get started?

“Mahatme is a hardcore payments professional, that’s the missing link for WhatsApp,” one of the sources said.

Amazon Pay has been increasingly offering users online bill payments and also acts as a digital wallet-service on the e-commerce giant’s India website.

As a director, Mahatme oversaw a team of senior product, engineering and business development leaders at Amazon Pay, his LinkedIn profile shows.

WhatsApp also has plans to deepen its partnership with banks in bid to offer financial services such as pensions and insurance, its India head Abhijit Bose – also a payments industry veteran – said last year.

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Amazon infuses ₹225 crore into payments unit Amazon Pay in India

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The fresh infusion is expected to help the company compete more aggressively against rivals like PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm.

Amazon has infused over ₹225 crore into its payments unit in India, Amazon Pay, according to regulatory documents. The fresh infusion is expected to help the company compete more aggressively against rivals like PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm.

The board has approved “allotment of 22,50,00000 equity shares… aggregating to ₹225 crore to the existing shareholder on rights basis”, regulatory documents sourced by business intelligence platform Tofler showed.

The shares were allotted to Amazon Corporate Holdings Private Limited and Amazon.com.Incs Limited, the documents filed with the Corporate Affairs ministry showed.

Amazon did not respond to queries.

In October last year, Amazon Pay had received over ₹700 crore, while in January, an infusion of ₹1,355 crore was made by these entities. Amazon has been pumping in millions of dollars across various operations like marketplace, wholesale and payments business as it looks to strengthen its position in the Indian market. In January last year, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had announced $1 billion (over ₹7,000 crore) incremental investment in India to help bring small and medium businesses online. Previously, the online retail giant had committed $5.5 billion investment in India, one of Amazon’s most important markets outside of the U.S. and a key growth driver.

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PhonePe Continues to Lead UPI-Based Payments Market With Over 970mn Transactions in February 2021

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PhonePe continued to lead the UPI-based digital payments market in India in February 2021, with over 970 million transactions, the company announced earlier today. The digital payments firm adds that the platform clocked over 1.07 billion total transactions across UPI, cards and wallets on its platform  for the same period. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) website shows that roughly 2,292 million UPI transactions worth Rs 4,25,062 crores took place in India last month, though the full report is yet to be shared. PhonePe’s domestic rival Paytm has also announced that the platform clocked more than 1.2 billion transactions in February 2021, posting a 15 percent month-on-month growth. In January 2021, Paytm Payments Bank took the third spot with 281.18 million UPI-based transactions worth Rs 33,909.50 crores.

PhonePe adds that its continuing success in the digital payments space is mainly attributed to the expansion across Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, where the company seemingly digitised over 17.5 million Kirana stores. The e-payments company had previously announced its plans to digitise 25 million Kiranas by the end of 2021. Speaking more over the development, Sameer Nigam, Founder and chief officer at PhonePe said that the company continues to dominate industry metrics in terms of the active user base, active merchant-base, total transactions and TPV (total payment volume). “We are delighted to retain our pole position as the top digital payments platform in the country. I am very proud to report that PhonePe is leading across all core. We will continue to transform lives positively while building simple, scalable and innovative products for every Indian,” Nigam in the statement added.

PhonePe’s growth can be also attributed to the slew of updates the app has been adding since last year. Recently, the company partnered with Axis Bank on UPI multi-bank model, giving users an option to create and use multiple UPI IDs with an Axis Bank ID. Apart from this, PhonePe will start acquiring merchants with Axis Bank in addition to its partnership with YES Bank. It recently crossed the 275-million registered user milestone. It had over 100 million monthly active users generating over 1 billion digital payment transactions in January alone. It is targeting to surpass 500-million registered users by December 2022.


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