Merchant payments platform, CashFree Payments, which is backed by India’s largest lender, State Bank of India, has acquired a majority stake in UAE-based payment solution provider (PSP), Telr. CashFree has invested $15 million to become the single largest shareholder with this investment. Besides, the company is also in talks with various fintech firms for acquisition purposes, Akash Sinha, co-founder and CEO of CashFree told BusinessToday.In in an exclusive interaction . He added that the startup will leverage this acquisition to grow seamless merchant-led cross-border payments and also to expand to middle-east markets where online payments still constitute 2 per cent of the overall transactions. Sinha also said that the company is actively looking to expand to South-East Asia in the merchant payments space. Besides Cashfree, fintech unicorn, Pinelabs, is also a key player in these markets. This strategic investment in Telr will enable the company to launch its distinctive offerings in the MENA region utilising Telr’s strong presence and payment infrastructure. In addition, Cashfree and Telr aim to develop a unified cross-border payments platform that would help Indian merchants accept payments from customers in the MENA region and vice-versa, via a single integration, the company said in an official handout. Through a single integration, Telr grants access to every payment method including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, UnionPay, Apple Pay, PayPal, SADAD, Mada and STCPay. With its one-stop mindset, Telr extended its services even further, offering a complete solution for the ecommerce world, covering a wide range of financial and business services including, social commerce, QR Codes, digital invoicing, Telr Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) in collaboration with Tabby, Telr Finance in collaboration with LNNDO, a merchant financing program, and Telr Shops the easy-to-use tool for creating an online store in minutes. With respect to its core India market, Sinha said that although the fintech space in India has witnessed strong competition in several years, the product suite offered by CashFree including payment collection, lending, payouts etc has enabled it to onboard over 1.3 lakh merchants. This amounts to 95 per cent growth since July 2020 when it had onboarded 70,000 merchants.
Also read: Credit card payment startup, slice, is India’s 41st unicorn this year