Axis Bank has bought Freecharge for $60 million (Rs 385 crores) in cash, the bank has informed the stock exchanges. This deal, and the amount, had been reported by The Economic Times yesterday, but at that time, was unconfirmed. Two companies: Accelyst Solutions and Freecharge Payment Technologies Pvt Ltd (FPTPL) are being acquired, with assets worth Rs 275.8 crores, and combined revenues of Rs 67.2 crores. Accelyst is "in the payments processing business", while FPTPL was running the semi close prepaid wallets business, licensed by the RBI. The deal is pending approval from the RBI and IRDAI. Note that Accelyst was the company acquired by Snapdeal in March 2015, for $300 million. FPTPL was the company set up for acquiring the wallet license, which it got in December 2016. Prior to setting up FPTPL, Freecharge used to run a wallet with Yes Bank. The company claimed to have 10 million wallet users in November 2015. The deal is a significant decline in value for Freecharge, which - it is believed - was acquired by Snapdeal for Rs 2400 crores. Much of the team that built/ran Freecharge exited: Alok Goel left immediately post the acquisition by Snapdeal, Rajesh Bysani went to Zoomcar, Pravin Jadhav left for Servify, among others. Govind Rajan, who had joined Snapdeal from Airtel, took over Freecharge CEO from Founder Kunal Shah, who took on a largely non-executive role as Chairman. Rajan left earlier this year. Jason Kothari, allegedly Softbank's "man for readying a sale" took over in March, a month…
