Visa’s investment in PayMate – which automates the procure-to-pay payments cycle for businesses – follows a deal struck between the two in March this year to aid the Indian firm’s expansion into the Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa (CEMEA) region.
Under the agreement, Visa’s commercial financial institution clients will extend PayMate’s platform to their corporate and small business customers, giving these customers the ability to make faster payments using Visa commercial cards.
T R Ramachandran, group country manager for Visa in India and South Asia says: “There is an opportunity to bring efficiencies into the B2B payments supply chain via richer data and automated processes. PayMate’s platform makes it possible for businesses to replace time-consuming, expensive manual processes with digital ways to manage their working capital.”
The 13-year-old startup, which had raised $18 million prior to the Series D, began its journey as a consumer-facing payments service. But it quickly shifted its attention to opportunities in the business-to-business payments market, Ajay Adiseshann, founder and CEO of PayMate said in an interview with TechCrunch.
PayMate today develops and offers cloud-based solutions for SME and enterprise customers to help them manage invoices and payments from vendors and customers. It also works with Visa and issuing banks to offer crediting financial options to customers.
Last year, PayMate acquired Z2P Technologies, a startup that offers lending technologies, to bring a lending stack on its platform. It looks at transactional data on its platform to score SMEs and offer them credits from third-party lenders. PayMate also serves as a discounting marketplace, allowing large enterprises to electronically negotiate offers with SMEs.
In India, and the same is true of some other markets, small and medium businesses often struggle to secure financing options from major banks. “India is very collateral-based in financing. On our platform, we have the visibility of their transactional data,” Adiseshann said. This helps establish transparency and trust between all the stakeholders.
The startup has more than 35,000 business customers that use its platform to process more than $5 billion in payments each year. It began operations in UAE earlier this year and will use the new capital to expand in Africa and parts of Europe, according to Adiseshann.
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
