Prepaid cards company ItzCash has secured an investment of Rs 100 crore from promoter Ashok Goel as it seeks a payments bank licence from the Reserve Bank of India, reports the Economic Times. The RBI's guidelines state that a company needs to have a minimum paid-up equity capital of Rs 100 crore to set up a payments bank. The report added that ItzCash will operate with an independent management and Ashok Goel's investment in the company comes in his personal capacity with no cross holding with parent the Essel Group, which also runs the daily DNA, DTH business Dish TV and the Zee Network. Goel already holds 60% stake in the payments company. Note, ItzCash will have to merge its existing prepaid payments instrument licence with the payments bank licence if it gets it from the RBI. Naveen Surya, managing director of ItzCash, told the publication that the company will be looking to raise an additional Rs 500-600 crore to expand the business from strategic partners and banks if it gets a payments bank licence. Other companies which are vying for a payments bank include Paytm, MobiKwik, Oxigen and FINO PayTech. The company in 2009 had raised Rs 50 crore from LightSpeed Venture Partners and prior to that it had raised Rs 10 million from Matrix Partners and Intel Capital. ItzCash earlier in 2011 had said that it had 8 million customers and across all its products, namely Itz Cash World franchisees, and NoQ24x7 Prepaid Cash Cards, processes over 100,000 transactions amounting to…
