PayU eyes B2B pay, credit play under new top brass

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

PayU is in the process of setting up business-to-business payment rails for its Indian clients. Additionally, the company is evaluating opportunities in the supply chain financing space.

“B2B payments is something that we are thinking very hard about … the idea is to expand into vendor payments and (look at) the different ways in which we can manage the suppliers of these anchor merchants, solve their reconciliation problems,” said Vijay Agicha, PayU’s global head of strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and investment.

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Eventually, once it is deeply embedded in the business payments ecosystem, the company would like to venture into small-ticket supply chain financing for its merchants, Agicha said. Last year, PayU participated in a Rs 114 crore funding round in Vayana Network and now holds a 4.6% stake in the supply chain financing startup.

Digitisation of small merchants is an expanding space in India, but competition is also very high. A founder with a major fintech startup, which competes with PayU, told ET that merchants tend to work with multiple payment providers —stickiness is low and mortality high in this segment.

“If a payment player can get deep into the merchant ecosystem, and become a full-stack service provider from consumer payments to business payouts, and consumer credit to supply chain financing, it can create a sticky client base,” the startup founder said.

While many of its competitors, including Paytm and Razorpay, have gone big in the offline space, PayU is