Prosus strikes $4.7-billion deal to buy BillDesk
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Bob van Dijk, group CEO at Prosus, said the regulatory clearances for the deal should be in place by February 2022. (Representative image)
Prosus, a global consumer internet group and one of the largest technology investors in the world, is acquiring local digital payments provider BillDesk in a $4.7-billion deal, one of the largest in the digital payments space.
Through this acquisition, Prosus plans to scale up it payments and fintech business PayU, which operates in more than 20 markets globally, as one of the leading online payment providers globally by total payment volume (TPV), aggregating $147 billion.
The deal, subject to the approval of the Competition Commission of India (CCI), will bring Prosus’s cumulative investment in Indian tech to over $10 billion, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
The development comes amid rapid adoption of fintech services by Indian consumers. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) expects more than 200 million new users to adopt digital payments over the next three years with the average annual transactions per capita rising tenfold from 22 to 220. In fact, India and China accounted for the highest fintech adoption rate in the world’s emerging markets, according to a joint report published by EY and IVCA earlier this year. India stood at an 87% adoption rate compared with the 64% global average as of March 2020.
Founded in 2000, BillDesk’s TPV stood at over $90 billion in FY21, the firm’s website showed. PayU India and BillDesk that run complementary businesses within India’s digital payment industry jointly expect to handle 4 billion transactions annually, four times that of PayU’s current level in the country.
“The ecosystem we are building through the acquisition of BillDesk provides the scale and growth opportunities to position PayU at the forefront of digital payments in India. The combination will allow us to gain scale, build market leadership across all payment verticals and establish a strong presence in the payment value chain serving merchants across all segments,” said Anirban Mukherjee, CEO at PayU India.
The deal marks PayU’s fourth fintech acquisition in India in less than five years, after CitrusPay, Paysense and Wibmo. “Together, PayU India and BillDesk will be able to meet the changing payments needs of digital consumers, merchants and government enterprises in India and offer state-of-the-art technology to even more of the excluded sections of society,” the companies said.
Bob van Dijk, group CEO at Prosus, said the regulatory clearances for the deal should be in place by February 2022.
The Indian fintech market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22.7% during 2020-25, analysts said. Local fintech firms attracted some $2 billion in funding in the first half of the calendar year alone, almost nearing the total investments the space garnered in the whole of 2020, analysts at KPMG said in a recent study.
One of the largest technology investors in the world, Prosus has backed a slew of Indian internet firms, including Swiggy, Byju’s, Meesho and Urban Company.
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