Amazon pumps in Rs 220 Cr fresh funds into payments arm Amazon Pay

Amazon Pay, the payments arm of the e-commerce major Amazon has received fresh funds of Rs 220 crore from the parent company. The fresh funding comes only after a month when it raised Rs 590 crore from the parent entity just before starting the flagship festival sale. Besides, it received Rs 230 crore  in July and Rs 195 crore in March this year.

In its regulatory filing, Amazon India had mentioned increasing its investment in its payments arm by at least five times. It has also increased its authorised capital for Amazon Pay to Rs 2,000 crore from Rs 400 crore.

Driven by cash backs and other easy payment option, Amazon Pay claims to account 75 per cent of all transactions on Amazon India during its festival sale. In contrast, it had claimed that more than 60 per cent of its transactions is driven by digital payment modes including net banking and Amazon Pay balance in 2017.

Amazon Pay allows customers to do bill payments, mobile recharges and for booking movie tickets and online food ordering via its platform.

For quite some time, the company has been pushing its big agenda of entering UPI ecosystem in India. While its UPI plan got stuck with government data localisation diktat, the e-commerce giant has launched a slew of customer-friendly payments option such as EMI through Amazon Pay to offer credit line up to Rs 60,000 to customers.

The Seattle-based company also acquired Tapzo and invested in ToneTag to ramp up its fintech vertical.

Apart from payments, Amazon is also looking to tap life, health, and general insurance around its payments arm. It is likely to sell third-party insurance products along with its investee Acko Insurance.

In its recent filing, Amazon Pay registered high growth in its operating revenue to Rs 389 crore in FY18 from Rs 4.1 crore in FY17. During the same period, its losses also grew by 88 per cent to Rs 334.2 crore.

The development was reported by ET.