Financial technologies solutions provider Infibeam Avenues Ltd on Monday said it has acquired a 100 per cent stake in Bengaluru-based Cardpay Technologies Ltd in an all-share deal. Cardpay offers a unified spend management platform to corporates under the brand name GRIT with physical and virtual credit cards, invoice processing and early payment discounting.

Following the deal, Cardpay will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infibeam.

For Infibeam, the acquisition of Cardpay strengthens its credit services business. It will make Infibeam the only Indian player with a complete suite of payments acquiring and payments issuing products, present on both sides of the digital payment transaction space, said the company.

In morning trade, Infibeam was trading at ₹56.20, down 1.49 per cent, on the BSE.

Cardpay was founded by Kumar Srinivasan, who has two decades of experience in payments, retail, credit and lending services. Post deal, Srinivasan and his team will continue to lead the operations of GRIT.

Speaking to BusinessLine , Vishwas Patel, Executive Director and Group CEO, Payment and Credit Services Division, Infibeam Avenues, said: “Over the last two decades, we have been playing an important part in growing the merchant payment acquiring base for making Digital India possible. Today, more than a million merchants use CCAvenue and other solutions to accept digital payments. Now, to further help our merchants to expedite their growth, our focus is to provide them with credit solutions. Payments-led lending is the new growth mantra for us and Cardpay’s card issuance technology and experienced team, along with Infibeam Avenues’s suite of fintech portfolio, will provide all the issuance, acquiring and credit solutions to all types of merchants, allowing them to scale and prosper.”

“We are very excited to join the Infibeam Avenues family,” said Srinivasan. “Infibeam Avenues has already cemented its position in the fintech industry in India and is expanding globally. We also built GRIT to be a global platform. This is a long-term relationship for us and we believe many good things will happen to the industry from this merger.”

Recurring expenses

Corporate credit cards are tailored to meet recurring business expenses of companies that generally face difficulty in getting working capital loans for such expenses from banks and other institutions, and which could also carry high interest rates. GRIT cards offer interest-free credit periods to companies.

On Friday, Infibeam had posted revenues of ₹648.1 crore for FY20, up 10 per cent from the previous fiscal. Profit after tax (PAT) excluding divestment and demerger of non-core businesses was at ₹99.8 crore, up 128 per cent.

However, revenue for the quarter ended March 2020 was down 27 per cent year-on-year at ₹135.9 crore, while PAT declined 25 per cent to ₹19.2 crore.

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