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.

WhatsApp may launch payment services commercially within two months

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has confirmed that WhatsApp will follow data localization rules over the next two months; so that it can launch its payments service in India on a full scale, PTI reported.

In an interview with PTI, Dilip Abse, CEO of NPCI said that even after WhatsApp out its payments service, it will take at least to cut the cash dominance in the country as the user base of digital payments needs to be at least treble to 300 million to have any tangible impact on paring cash usage.

“There are still a couple of intermediaries where work is in progress. One is Google, and the second is WhatsApp. We believe WhatsApp will be fully compliant in the next two months' time,” said Mr. Abse.

Since 2018, users have been using a beta version of the payment services in India and stakeholders, and its 300 million users have been eagerly waiting for the official launch.

A third-party audit by a firm impanelled by the RBI is currently underway to ascertain WhatsApp's compliance. Once the auditors complete their probe, NPCI will review the same and will see how to move forward, added Mr. Abse.

Mr. Abse hoped that the popularity of digital payments would thrive in India with the increased use of NPCI-developed UPI platform by intermediaries like WhatsApp.