Bengaluru, NFAPost: The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) released a statement recently disclosing that it has widened its shareholder base, which sets the valuation of the entity at Rs 1,763 crore.
It has done this by completing the private placement of 4.63% of its equity shares worth Rs 81.64 crore. Some of the 19 new shareholders include Amazon Pay, Paytm Payments Bank, PhonePe, Mobiwik, Pine Labs, Standard Chartered Bank and PayU.
This comes after the total number of UPI transactions had crossed the 2 billion mark in last month, October 2020. Also, the development comes at a time when digital transaction is gaining lot more traction with the advent of Covid-19 pandemic.
Payment Industry
Commenting on the development, NPCI said in a statement this broad basing exercise was done to further diversify and distribute the NPCI shareholding to a larger set of the RBI regulated entities and categories of payment industry participants.
“NPCI made an offer for the private placement to 131 RBI regulated entities, out of which 19 evinced interest and were allotted shares in NPCI. With this shareholding expansion, NPCI gets on-board some of the leading banks, new categories of banks and the RBI authorised non-bank entities,” said NPCI said in a statement.
According to NPCI Chief Finance Officer Rupesh H Acharya, NPCI is extremely pleased with the outcome of this exercise and the confidence expressed in the corporation’s continued growth and larger purpose.
Shareholding
“With this we have also broad-based our shareholding to include new categories like payment banks, small finance banks and payment system operators in addition to existing public sector, private sector, foreign, cooperative and regional rural banks,” said Rupesh H Acharya.
NPCI is is an umbrella organisation for operating retail payments and settlement systems in India. An organisation led by RBI and IBA, NPCI enables digital payments and settlement systems. In a recent development, NPCI announced a cap of 30% of the total volume of transactions processed in UPI. The cap will apply to all Third-Party App Providers (TPAPs).
According to industry analyst, the decision of putting minted cap could pose a big problem for both Google and Walmart, now top players in India’s payments sector, currently handling nearly 80% of UPI transactions.