Cross-Border Payments: PayU Acquires Zooz
PayU –payment subsidiary of Naspers Group– acquires the Israel-based start-up Zooz. This announcement occurs just after their rival PayPal led a $50 million funding round for the London FinTech PPRO, which focuses on cross-border payments for merchants. The amount of this buyout hasn’t been disclosed, but could be worth roughly $50 to $100 million.
This Israeli FinTech was founded in 2010 and designed a platform which includes several payment providers for optimising financial flows. Since no dedicated standard is available, Zooz provides e-merchants with an API enabling them to accept various means of payment. The point is to help them adjust to market needs.
With this buyout, PayU intends to cover cross-border payments and further expand on fast-growing markets. This group already proposes roughly 250 payment methods for their users: Zooz will contribute to enhancing this portfolio and strengthening their position.
PayU and Zooz will also be crafting a payment infrastructure to include new features such as smart routing, real-time reporting and fraud management.
Comments – Payments: consolidation on a fast track
In the US card-based payments are standard, but only account for 20% of the e-commerce transactions. In order to address online CNP fraud issues, some companies are opting for alternative solutions such as bank transfer, cash-on-delivery, or even designing their own payment methods. Yet, an issue arises when merchants do not accept the local payment method their customers want to use. Zooz deals with this through proposing cross-border payment services.
Also, this is not the first partnership between these two companies: they already joined forces to propose new payment options to their partners. Their services will now be merged for the sake of customer experience and, in turn, for helping e-merchants improve their processes.
A revolution is still underway on the market for processing merchants’ online payments: this acquisition stresses an ongoing evolution.