Ebanx Views India Expansion as ‘Center’ of Its Payments Vision

Brazilian payments company Ebanx is reportedly preparing to expand into India by year’s end.

As Bloomberg News reported Monday (Sept. 18) the company will soon begin letting global merchants process payments via its platform. The expansion will also include India’s popular Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system.

“It’s in the center of our vision to expand into emerging markets — we call them rising markets — and connect them to global commerce,” Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Joao Del Valle told Bloomberg. “Our merchants in the U.S., Europe and China have demand for India, they have businesses there and they need support.”

According to the report, moving into India gives Ebanx a foothold in a country where more than a fifth of its billion-plus people use UPI, which is projected to process around 1 billion transactions per day by the end of the year.

PYMNTS’ Intelligence found that 48% of consumers in India paid for their last retail purchase using UPI, which was launched by the country’s central bank in 2016.

UPI is more popular for digital retail purchases, with 55% of Indian consumers paying for their most recent digital retail purchase using the system, while 37% did the same for in-store retail purchases. UPI is also the preferred payment method when purchasing retail products, with half of consumers surveyed naming it as their preference.

Paula Bellizia, president of global payments for Ebanx, said in the Bloomberg report that the company works to give merchants the flexibility to process payments in the methods their consumers prefer through a single platform.

“When we talk about rising markets, we talk about all kinds of payment methods that are preferred by the consumers,” she said.

Ebanx had planned to go public, seeking a value of $10 billion, but put those plans on hold last year, citing market volatility.

An initial public offering is not in the company’s immediate future, Del Valle told Bloomberg, “but it’s definitely a very well-considered milestone” in one to three years.

Founded in Brazil in 2012, Ebanx spent its first decade expanding into 15 Latin American nations before announcing plans last year to push into Africa.

“Africa is now bursting with growth potential,” Bellizia said at the time. “Digital adoption and consumption of online goods and services have accelerated rapidly within its countries, and investment capital has been pouring into the region.

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