Mobile payment gateway Wibmo acquires social payment startup Mypoolin

Mobile peer-to-peer and group payments application Mypoolin has been acquired by US-headquartered payments solution company Wibmo in a cash and stock deal. The deal is said to be valued above $1 million.

The platform will continue to operate as an Indian subsidiary of Wibmo, according to the company statement. And the acquisition will help the company to expand its consumer base.

"With Wibmo, we will be able to scale up our products and create a broad range of solutions to meet the payments need of consumers and merchants in the country," said Mypoolin co-founder Ankit Singh in a company statement.

Incorporated in 2014 by Rohit Taneja and Ankit Singh, Mypoolin is a social payment app that enables users to send and receive money with friends in the smartest and fastest manner. The company also enables its users to make seamless merchant and peer to peer payments on the UPI platform.

The Gurgaon-based company claims to have a user base of over 1,50,000 people. In 2016, Mypoolin partnered with Yes bank for Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to ensures a secure mode of payments where details of the clients are captured by the bank’s account software while nothing is stored on the device.

Prior to UPI, it had enabled peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers via debit and credit cards, but it required the user to transfer the amount to the wallet first and the amount resided in an escrow account till the transaction is complete.

Also Read: After Paytm, Google plays ‘instant chat’ card with Tez

Now the digital payment has turned out to be one of the most fierce battles being fought on Indian turf. After e-commerce, global technology giants have been at loggerheads for winning a major slice of fledgling digital payment space.

Paytm, Google, Facebook (via WhatsApp), Amazon and Uber had thrown their bets on fast emerging UPI-enabled payment wave. In fact, the NPCI-powered payment mechanism has been grabbing a substantial part of overall digital payment transactions (volume as well as value wise) in India.

The battle in UPI ecosystem is slated to get intensified as WhatsApp is slated to open its UPI-enabled payment soon to its 250 million user base in India. Besides, Google has also thrown its dice with Tez.

The development was first reported by Mint.