As the digital payments space in India heats up, global ecommerce giant Amazon has invested Rs 260 crore into its payments arm Amazon Pay. Economic Times reports that this is Amazon’s push to move its wallet beyond just Amazon to other online merchants.
The infusion has come from Singapore-based Amazon Corporate Holdings and its US-based parent Amazon, according to Registrar of Companies (RoC) filings.
Amazon got a licence to operate a prepaid payment instrument from the RBI earlier this year. It also recently announced that it would allow its customers to use Amazon Pay balance account for booking tickets across BookMyShow platforms.
Amazon has so far invested Rs 350 crore into Amazon Pay and a testament to its aggressive India plans is the fact that is has also increased its authorized capital for Amazon Pay from Rs 400 crore to Rs 2,000 crore to take on rivals such as Flipkart’s PhonePe, Paytm and MobiKwik.
This comes at a time when Flipkart announced that it will be investing $500 million into PhonePe and the first tranche of $180-200 million is expected to be invested by December or January. This is in addition to the $75 million Flipkart has so far invested in its payments arm.
One of the biggest players in the payments space, Paytm has also been expanding operations aggressively. It recently raised a whopping $14 billion from SoftBank.
While the FinTech space continues to grow, recent RBI guidelines for mobile wallets could increase costs as they are now mandated to do full KYC.
Amazon had also said when the guidelines were released that the guidelines would add friction to customers and costs to the issuer, adding that in line with international guidelines, a framework of proportional KYC could have been adopted.