PayU acquires Wibmo for $70 Mn

Financial institutions, internet payment service providers (PSPs), credit card companies, and all the payment solution companies to give all the services online, mobile banking and commerce are faced with the mounting challenge of making digital transactions safer.

To boost this sector digital payment majorNaspers-owned PayU India has entered the field of security solutions with the California based payments security and mobile payments technology company Wibmo for $70 million. Wibmo is one of the leaders in the 3D secure space where they offer authentication services and digital payments, founded by Govind Setlur. With this acquisition Wibmo is expected to have clocked a 4X return as it exits the company.

Recently, appointed Anirban Mukherjee is new PayU India CEO, worked with Reliance Payments by replacing Amrish Rau, who was last month elevated to head of financial technology partnerships and investments for Naspers. Mukherjee responsibility will be to manage $100 million worth of business and double its loan book to around $2 billion in the next few years.

Jitendra Gupta, MD, PayU India is focusing strongly to scale to address the consumer business with the support of LazyPay. To scale up the opportunity, PayU has acquired Citrus Pay for $130 million in September 2016. The report says, PayU is doing two million transactions in a month with LazyPay. Then in Sept 2018, PayU India has got a licence from the Reserve Bank of India to open its own non-banking financial company (NBFC). This was a big push to PayU credit-focused business. The company now clocks to see the opportunity to address India’s consumer credit market, which is said be easily a trillion-dollar market.

Now, PayU aims to leverage his international expertise across US, India and APAC in the payments, lending and banking. To move to the next ladder in security portfolio, PayU plans to adress the data flowing through the Wibmo platform to help it assess merchants better so that they can offer credit to these entities in partnership with financial institutions.