Europe's Ogone Payment Services Acquires E-Billing Solutions

Europe's leading online payment platform Ogone Payment Services has acquired Mumbai-based E-Billing Solutions, one of the largest online payment providers, for an undisclosed sum, the company has said in a statement on Friday. This is Ogone's first acquisition outside the European market.

EBS will continue to operate under its current management structure, retain the same name and brand, continue to expand and will be responsible for running the operations, according to Ogone.

"Only 8.4 per cent of the Indian market is currently online but this translates to 100 million users, which makes it the fourth largest online country in the world and this is set to grow rapidly with online travel accounting for 80 per cent of the commerce in India. Acquiring a leading company such as EBS represents huge potential for us and our European merchants," Peter De Caluwe, CEO of Ogone Payment Services, commented on the deal.

Growth partnership firm IndigoEdge advised EBS on the deal while Ogone was advised by Bryan, Garnier & Co, an independent pan-European investment bank focused on growth companies.

Ogone offers solutions for managing electronic payments across several domains including e-commerce, ticketing, call centres, airlines and travel in B2C and B2B environments.

EBS was co-founded by Nishanth Chandran and Prabhu Ram in 2005 and it claims to hold 20 per cent of the market share (in terms of merchant base) in the Indian payment gateway industry.

India currently records 2.1 billion non-cash transactions, compared to 15 billion transactions in Brazil, 5.4 billion in China and 2.8 billion in Russia, according to a recently published joint report by Capgemini, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and The European Financial Marketing Association.

The number of global e-payments (online payments for e-commerce activities) is expected to grow from 17.9 billion to 30.3 billion transactions between 2010 and 2013, while mobile payments are expected to grow from 4.6 billion to 15.3 billion transactions during the same period, the report states.

E-commerce in India is a $5 billion market and according to industry body IAMAI estimates, it is expected to touch $10.27 billion by the end of 2011. The e-commerce segment continues to see more investments flowing in, as well as strategic shifts, with expansion of categories, verticalisation and the well-capitalised start-ups ramping up and innovating to service the growing customer base.