Ecommerce giant Flipkart has acquired majority stake for Rs 45.4 crore in FX Mart, reports iamWire. Flipkart disclosed the terms of the deals in the registrar of companies filings. The move will help Flipkart offer digital wallet services on its app as FX Mart holds a prepaid payments instrument licence from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
iamWire further reports that Flipkart is not planning to use the payment service on its own platform, but it will offer this service on third-party sites and apps later. It also added that two senior Flipkart executives have joined the board of FX Mart.
This is Flipkart’s second investment in the payments space. It had acquired 65.71% stake in mobile payments platform ngpay in December last year. Sourabh Jain, the promoter-shareholder of ngpay, will hold the remaining stake. As per the agreement, Jain and Flipkart have set up ngpay in Singapore.
Flipkart’s investment in ngpay assumed significance as the company had begun phasing out its own payments gateway Payzippy after the RBI did not grant a semi-closed wallet licence in 2013.
It’s worth noting that earlier in August, online cab aggregator Ola said that its in app wallet Ola Money can now be used to pay for other companies like Oyo Rooms, Lenskart and Saavn among others across India. Ola told MediaNama that it had tied up with ZipCash for its wallet services.
ZipCash got its semi closed payments instrument licence from the Reserve Bank of India in 2009. ZipCash had previously introduced a mobile payment service called M-Wallet which offered peer-to-peer money transfer on any mobile of any operator across India, in partnership with Loop Mobile.
Payments bank
Last month, the RBI also gave in-principle nod to 11 applicants for payments banks which included payments service Paytm and Tech Mahindra which also holds a pre-paid payments instrument. Although FX Mart was among the 41 who applied for a payments bank, its application was rejected.
