Amazon Pay strengthens war chest with fresh infusion from parent

Amazon Corporate Holdings Singapore has led an infusion of Rs 450 crore ($64.2 million) in Amazon Pay, the e-commerce platform’s digital payments vertical in India. 

The investment in Amazon Pay (India) Pvt. Ltd was made on June 6, show filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Amazon.com Mauritius contributed Rs 4.5 lakh.

Thus far, around Rs 1,050 crore has been pumped into the payments entity in all. Amazon Pay had previously received a tranche of Rs 600 crore from the Singapore entity in January.

The company, which opened up peer-to-peer payments via the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) through its wallet in April, has been incentivising customers through cashbacks for using the wallet to pay utility bills and book tickets for travel.

These incentives have also been extended to payments at offline businesses including More supermarkets, which Amazon and private equity firm Samara Capital had acquired a few months ago. It has also become a platform for facilitating fintech services including insurance and EMI.

According to reports, the company has also been piloting offline payment touch points through its investee company, ToneTag, which it had backed in 2018.

Amazon Pay competes closely with Flipkart Group company PhonePe and Alibaba-backed Paytm in certain use cases. Recent media reports have suggested that both PhonePe and Paytm are in talks to raise fresh funding upwards of $1 billion.