With acquisition of Red Dot Payments, PayU marks entry in SEA region

Naspers' fintech arm PayU is acquiring Singapore’s largest digital payments firm Red Dot Payments(RDP). The company has acquired a majority stake in RDP, which is now valued at about $65 million. However, the actual monetary value of the transaction was not disclosed.

Following the transaction, founder CEO Randy Tan will retain a stake while other major shareholders will liquidate their holdings in the company. With this deal, the total amount invested in fintech companies in the past three years by PayU will jump to more than $700 million.

RDP was founded in 2011 by a group of payment experts from various Fortune 500 industry companies and went on to become the biggest online payment firm in Singapore. The service has many use cases but largely used in sectors like food delivery, hospitality, online retail, charity, among others. 

Apart from RDP, other major platforms in Singapore include Dash which was launched by the telecommunication giant Singtel and also supports NFC payments through Apple Pay. Association of Banks in Singapore has also floated its own platform for fund transfer called PayU which is a staple among the customers of these 9 major banks operating in the island country.

In a statement released on Friday, PayU’s CEO Laurent le Moal informed that with this acquisition, the company will look to provide its existing global merchants access to Southeast Asia region with single API integration and strengthen the global PayU Hub platform.

Naspers which already operates in markets like India, Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe, is looking to tap the huge potential Southeast Asian market.

In a Google-Temasek study,  it was found out that being the world’s fastest-growing digital payment market, Southeast Asia would triple its digital payments to a volume of $240 billion by 2025. The six largest countries in this region have around 350 million internet users already, larger than the population of the USA and will be a huge potential market for global traders.