11 highlights
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There has been a subtle shift in the colour of investments in the Indian fintech industry over the past two years. While venture capital continues to dominate the landscape, global financial giants and fintechs are investing in Indian fintechs or have announced their own entry into the market in some fashion.
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The reason for this global play is twofold. First, global companies want to piggyback on the success of a few Indian fintechs. Second, some of them want to launch in India and grab a share of the estimated $31 billion fintech market while it’s still easy to do so.
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Earlier this week, Australian buy-now-pay-later firm Zip Co. announced a $50 million investment in ZestMoney, a home-grown BNPL player.
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The nascent neobanking space India too has attracted global attention. In August, Brazil-based NuBank led a $45 million Series B round in Jitendra Gupta’s neobank Jupiter Money.
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Coinbase, the leading crypto-currency exchange in the US, is building out its Indian operations while Bengaluru-based blockchain firm Polygon recently raised funding from billionaire investor Mark Cuban.
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On Monday, Razorpay announced that it received a strategic investment from Salesforce Ventures for an undisclosed amount.
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Also, recently, PayU—which houses all of South African conglomerate Naspers’s global payments businesses, with India being the biggest—paid $4.7 billion to acquire BillDesk.
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Earlier this month, NPCI announced that UPI will be linked with Singapore’s PayNow, which would enable instant, low-cost cross-border transfers between the two countries—though it’s not entirely clear yet how this will function.
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Then there is the National Payments Corporation of India’s global expansion plans. The retail payments umbrella organization has already pushed its RuPay card network and its flagship payments platform, the Unified Payments Interface, into Bhutan. Recently, it announced several partnerships to export UPI to the United Arab Emirates
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Most of the innovations in finance nowadays come from the emerging markets
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The Chinese property giant is on the verge of a collapse, the magnitude of which is making many experts call it the “Lehman moment” of China. Evergrande is the world’s most indebted real estate developer and its collapse is expected to have spillover effects on the global economy.