Ecommerce firm Flipkart confirmed to MediaNama that it has bought payments company PhonePe. The PhonePe team will transition to Flipkart but will function as an independent business unit. A report by Mint says that the size of the deal was in the range of $10-20 million. PhonePe was started by three former Flipkart employees Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer in December 2015. PhonePe is yet to launch a product but it says that it is the first payments company to utilize the NPCI's unified payments interface (UPI). UPI, planned to go live in this April, will allow users to transact using their unique identification and mobile phone number or virtual payments address without sharing any other bank details. In contrast to the present payments process, which involves entering numerous account/card details and multi-level interventions, UPI will provide a secure hassle-free digital payments experience. This is Flipkart's third acquisition in the payments space. In September 2015, it acquired majority stake for Rs 45.4 crore in FX Mart, which holds a prepaid payments instrument license from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). At that time, Flipkart was not planning to use the payment service on its own platform, but instead offer this service on third-party sites and apps later. Apparently, two senior Flipkart executives had also joined the board of FX Mart. It had acquired 65.71% stake in mobile payments platform ngpay in December 2014, which was set up in Singapore. Flipkart’s investment in ngpay assumed significance as the company had begun phasing out its…
