Pine Labs Raises another $100 Million in Funding

One of Asia's leading merchant commerce platform Pine Labs has raised another $100 million in funding weeks after raising $600 million in a financing round. This funding came from Invesco Developing Markets Fund.

"Over the last 18 months we have scaled our Prepaid Issuing stack, Online Payments, and also the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) offering. We continue to make progress in the larger Asian markets with our BNPL platform. Very excited to have a marquee investor like Invesco join us in the journey," said B. Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs.

Pine Labs counts Sequoia Capital, Temasek Holdings, Actis, PayPal and Mastercard as its investors. The company offers a range of payment solutions and BNPL offering at the POS. The company recently started focusing on the consumer side of business with the acquisition of fintech platform Fave in April this year.

"The Invesco Developing Markets Fund is pleased to invest in Pine Labs, a leading fintech services company in India that fits our strategy of seeking high quality companies that have durable long-term growth potential," said Justin Leverenz, CIO of Developing Markets Equities at Invesco.

 

PayPal’s Paidy Deal Substantiates Pandemic-Led FinTech Boom

The US-based PayPal Holdings Inc confirms that it is taking over Paidy, a buy now, pay later platform, for $2.7 billion, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

Buying Paidy, PayPal is all set to expand its footprint in the US where online shopping has tripled during the last decade to roughly $ 200 billion. Even though two-thirds of purchases are still paid in cash, the FinTech company is optimistic about its continued growth in the US.

The PayPal-Paidy deal reflects how the pandemic-led boom continues to broaden its horizon. Besides FinTech, the ecommerce and manufacturing sectors have witnessed a major boom during the pandemic.

“I wouldn't view this (deal) as impacting the U.S. BNPL market but more as PayPal's route into the Japanese market,” Kunaal Malde, an analyst at Atlantic Equities, said.

Like Americans, the Japanese also prefer cash over online transactions. However, things have changed in the recent past as the FinTech industry continues to flourish.

“One of the notable things about Japan’s BNPL market compared to the United States or Europe is that most users clear their outstanding balance by the end of the month in one payment. In Japan accumulating debt is more frowned on.”

With all this said, PayPal is eyeing the top spot in an industry experiencing a boom led by the ongoing pandemic.

The quotes used in this piece were extracted from Reuters.

 

TNS Expands to 11 More Countries in Asia Pacific

Transaction Network Services (TNS) is widely known for providing a full suite of low latency services across the globe and has a strong presence in the Asia Pacific region. The company has now further expanded its presence by reaching 11 more countries in the region.

“The Asian financial markets include many of the world’s leading, as well as rapidly emerging, stock exchanges. Extending TNS’ presence and connectivity in Asia gives us the ability to offer traders access to these financial centers and exchanges simply, quickly and with a lower total cost of ownership,” said Tom Lazenga, TNS’ Vice President of Global Sales, in a statement.

Founded in 1990 in the U.S. and headquartered in Reston, Virginia, TNS provides an extensive portfolio of services to customers in more than 60 countries spanning the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific.

The latest expansion of TNS has delivered lowest latency in the region. The company is making use of the lowest latency commercially available network links in the APAC region. This network is designed to deliver streaming of market data globally. It can deliver APAC sourced market data to the U.S. and the U.S. sourced market data to APAC.

With this expansion, TNS now offers coverage across 11 countries and 23 exchanges in Asia that is hugely benefitting the trading industry.

 

Retail Giant Walmart Focus on Hiring Digital, Cryptocurrency Lead

Walmart, the largest US retailer by total sales, has stated that it is looking to hire a digital currency and cryptocurrency product lead. The company has stated that this new role seeks to provide leadership with ways to identify technology and current customer trends. Part of the role's remit will also include driving the retail giant's digital currency strategy. Investments needed to build on those existing trends will also be advised by the crypto product lead.

It is likely that Walmart is making moves to accept cryptocurrency as payment. Besides, in 2019, the company applied for a patent on price-stable crypto similar to Facebook's nascent project, which was called Libra. Walmart has also experimented with distributed ledger technology for many nonfinancial uses like tracking drugs and food along the supply chain.

Now Walmart has created a fintech unit called Hazel. This move has now signaled the big-box retailer has not lost its appetite for a piece of the consumer finance pie. It is only a matter of time before the world's retail giants open the floodgates by enabling crypto payments; the rest will follow pretty quickly when that happens.