PayU Selling Bulk of Business to Rapyd to Focus on India

Payments company PayU will sell most of its global business to Rapyd in a $610 million deal.

The all-cash transaction, announced Tuesday (Aug. 1), will allow PayU to focus on the Indian payment and FinTech market, where it serves more than 450,000 merchants and two million credit customers, owner Prosus said in a news release.

“Innovation and progressive regulation are driving rapid change within the digital payments industry in India, and we see many new opportunities to further expand our business there,” said Bob van Dijk, Prosus’ CEO.

“As one of the fastest-growing major economies in the world, we strongly believe in digital India and are excited about the next phase of growth for PayU in India.”

As PYMNTS has written, India has one of the fastest-growing eCommerce markets in the world, with yearly online sales exceeding $67 billion in 2021. Close to 90% of its adult residents use mobile wallets, while 833.7 million consumers are connected to the internet.

News of a possible sale emerged in May in a Bloomberg News report that said Prosus could sell parts of PayU — which operates in 50 countries — while it focuses on India.

With this deal, Rapyd — a London-based digital payment processing and infrastructure provider — will be able to scale and market its presence in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, the news release said.

The company is purchasing a business that provides eCommerce payment solutions for global merchants in more than 30 countries in Africa, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe, and which makes up around 30% of PayU’s overall revenues. 

During the company’s last fiscal year, total payment volumes for the global payments business rose 12% to $34 billion, Prosus said. 

PYMNTS’ Karen Webster spoke with PayU Global Payments CEO Mario Shiliashki in April on the last five years of innovation in the payments sector.

As that report noted, national real-time payment schemes like Brazil’s Pix and India’s UPI were still talking points five years ago, but now hold prominent places in any conversation about cross-border payments and expansion into emerging markets.

“We thought, ‘OK, we need to integrate Pix. That’s fine, but let’s see. Will it really take off?’ It’s taken off and then some,” Shiliashki told Webster.

“You see local merchants on the street and kiosk vendors accepting Pix,” he added. “The new way to donate on the street is Pix. People may not have a place to sleep, but they have a Pix account. It’s pretty incredible. We’ve seen something similar in India with UPI, and Blik came out [in Poland] and created its own trend.”