Visa extends tie-up with PayMate to boost B2B payments in CEMEA region

Indian cloud-based business-to-business payments solutions provider PayMate has extended its partnership with multinational financial services firm Visa to strengthen the business-to-business payments needs of the latter's financial institution clients in the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA) region, a company statement said.

Visa's customers in the region will gain access to PayMate's proprietary payments platform, the statement added 

The two firms had initially collaborated in 2017 to strengthen B2B payments services in India. 

“Visa has a significant focus on digitisation of B2B payments and we are teaming up with companies like PayMate to help simplify the payables and receivables processes,” said Rakesh Khanna, vice president and head of Visa Business Solutions, CEMEA Visa, in the statement.

Khanna also pointed out that Visa’s initial collaboration with PayMate saw a large number of enterprises and small and medium businesses use the service, which resulted in significant growth in B2B payments volume. He also said that Visa was keen on expanding the alliance to enable CEMEA clients to make use of the B2B payment platform.

“At the same time, we are introducing secure, fast and efficient digital payments to the sellers to help optimise their cash flows,” he added.

On the same lines, Ajay Adiseshann, founder and chief executive of PayMate, said there is increased demand to automate and digitise the procurement to payment cycle to save costs, time and effort.

“We have a comprehensive payments platform that reduces expenses and time for processing payments, thus helping buyers pay earlier and helping sellers receive payments faster,” said Adiseshann.

PayMate

Founded in 2006 by Adiseshann, the cloud-based platform digitises the procurement-to-payment cycle for businesses. It helps firms move away from legacy systems to real-time digital payments platform. PayMate helps in automation, vendor payment managing and customer invoicing.

In May last year, it acquired peer-to-peer online lending platform Z2P Technologies. The deal helped PayMate build a platform to offer credit to small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Visa

In February this year, the payments tech firm led a $76-million round in Indian payments firm BillDesk along with Singapore Temasek Holdings. The round valued BillDesk at $1.53 billion, catapulting it into the haloed unicorn club.

In November last year, Visa picked up a minority stake in BillDesk to expand its India operations.

Visa had also started a sector-agnostic programme in India to support early-stage startups with up to Rs 50 lakh in seed funding in areas such as technology, upgrading citizen services, product ideation and development, and go-to-market strategies. The programme was launched in late August last year by BLS International Services Ltd, an outsourcing service provider for visa and consular services.

Now, Visa seems to be eyeing foreign markets, more specifically the CEMEA area, by leveraging the solutions provided by Indian companies.