Infibeam Avenues Ltd., the company that behind ecommerce platform ‘Infibeam.com’ and payment gateway giant CC Avenue, has announced an all-stock acquisition in the Bengaluru-based Cardpay Technologies. As a result of this deal, Cardpay will become a fully-owned subsidiary of Infibeam. Cardpay founders and team will continue to lead the operations of GRIT, the brand under which Cardpay ran its spend management business.

The initial cash consideration of this deal is $60,000 (approximately ₹45 lakhs).

Cardpay Technologies, founded by Kumar Srinivasan in March 2020, is a fintech platform. It offers a wide range of services, including payment gateway, card acquiring, alternative payment methods, recurring and instalment payments, business accounts, card issuing, foreign exchange and more. It has a market in the middle east as well as the U.S.

Infibeam, as is know, runs multiple internet and e-commerce businesses, having also recently diversified into digital payments, online retailing, e-commerce software and internet services. The company, headquartered in Ahmedabad, came to rise when it became the first sizeable ecommerce company in the country, to have successfully done an IPO back in 2016. Infibeam-owned CC Avenue was one of the first to start digital payment facilitation in India, and has grown on to become one of the largest such platforms in the country. The platform processes over ₹1.35Bn worth of transactions on a daily basis.

“The acquisition of Cardpay strengthens its payments credit services business with a comprehensive credit issuance portfolio including secured and unsecured lending”, Infibeam said in a statement. “The acquisition makes Infibeam, the only Indian player with a complete suite of payments acquiring and payments issuing products, present on both sides of digital payment transaction”, the company added.

Like most of the world, Infibeam too has been impacted by COVID19, as it witnessed a 27% decline in its revenues to INR 1,359 million in Q1 of 2020. However, the management is of strong opinion that the situation will normalize during this current financial year as more and more people and businesses have started adopting digital technology.

“There would be reward incentive mechanism to the management of the target company (Cardpay) up to rupees equivalent to $1 million, based on performance parameters of the target company, as mutually agreed,” Infibeam said in a statement.