Amazon Pay scoops up Rs 195 Cr from parent entity, appoints Mahendra Nerurkar as director

During the time when wallet companies are grappling under strict RBI’s (Reserve Bank of India) regulations, Amazon infused Rs 195 crore more into its payments arm Amazon Pay, according to RoC filings.

The latest investment came from Singapore-based Amazon Corporate Holdings Pvt Ltd and Amazon.com.incs Ltd.

This is the second round of funding into Amazon Pay by the parent company within past six months. In September last year, Amazon had pumped in Rs 260 crore into its wallet unit.

Last summer, Amazon Pay expanded its use cases outside its online marketplace and since then it has pulled out all the stops to emerge as a serious competition to incumbents.

Recently, Amazon Pay has appointed Mahendra Nerurkar to lead its digital payment service while Sriraman Jagannathan stepped down from the function. Jagannathan continues as a director on the Board of the company.

It also has on-boarded major brands such as BookMyShow, FreshMenu, redBus, Housejoy, Yatra and Haptik, among several others for enabling payment.

Importantly, Amazon Pay had claimed that more than 60 per cent of its transaction was driven by digital payment modes including net banking and Amazon Pay balance in 2017.

This was almost 10-15 percent jump from 2016 as its digital transactions were below 50 per cent in that year.

Digital wallets had witnessed a spike in transaction post demonetisation in December 2016. However, their growth has been choking for over past 8-10 months as UPI-enabled payment service making quick inroads.

Additionally, mandatory know your customer (KYC) for all Prepaid Payment Instruments (PPI) from The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) had caused loss of more than 40 per cent of overall mobile wallets user base.

At a time of the end of the deadline for KYC, which was on February 28, there were more than 500 million mobile wallet users on Paytm, Mobikwik, Amazon Pay, PhonePay, and others, combinedly.

These wallets are going to lose over 200 million users as they failed to do the required KYC.

The development was first reported by papaer.vc.