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June 23, 2022
New Delhi, June 23, 2022 - Leading merchant commerce platform, Pine Labs today announced that it is acquiring Bengaluru-based Setu, a fast-growing API fintech startup. This is the third acquisition announced by Pine Labs this year.
Commenting on the announcement, B Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs, said "Setu will make an incredible addition to the Pine Labs platform for a few reasons. Embedded financial services and open banking are going to be the way forward and the embedded finance market value is expected to exceed US $138 bn by 2026 as APIs are intensifying the competitive fintech landscape. Setu helps their customers, merchants, and brands build beautiful experiences, so consumers can engage with payments and financial services on their terms. We are in the golden phase of digitisation in India, and Setu is a pioneer in supporting innovation on the India stack - their work on UPI and in the account aggregator space is moving the industry forward. Lastly, Setu is a team of builders and entrepreneurs, and together with the Pine Labs team will tackle hard problems to solve in the ecosystem. We are more than delighted to welcome the co-founders Nikhil and Sahil and their young and vibrant team to the Pine Labs family."
"I have seen both Sahil and Nikhil at close quarters earlier, at Aadhaar and UPI. The kind of infra Setu is building will be very important for India in the years to come and I am happy that they are relentlessly moving towards that goal and this partnership with Pine Labs will help them to accelerate. My best wishes to both Amrish and the team at Setu!" said Nandan Nilekani, Co-founder and Chairman of Infosys Technologies Limited.
Setu has seen strong demand for its products - their APIs are being used across diverse industry verticals today including startups, retail enterprises, banks, insurance, and lending companies. Setu's existing and emerging use cases cut across multiple digital ecosystems, from Aadhaar eSign to BBPS bill payment, payment collection integration via WhatsApp, FASTag payment collection and more.
"We are excited with this investment coming from Pine Labs. At Setu, we are building some amazing products and enabling a future of consent-driven access to financial data. We believe democratization of technology will yield better results when it comes to making financial products accessible to all and therefore have our APIs open for the developer community. Pine Labs' network of merchants and issuers coupled with our API integration prowess will help achieve great results in personal finance management, monitoring loans to predict default rates, credit underwriting, and several other areas," said Sahil Kini, Co-founder and CEO at Setu.
Setu works with Account Aggregator partners which are non-banking financial companies operating under the NBFC-AA license from the Reserve Bank of India. They enable the consolidation of all financial data of users at a single location and allows users to access services quickly. These Account Aggregators operate under the NITI Aayog's consent-driven data-sharing framework called Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA).
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Setu empowers businesses and developers to reimagine financial products for the next billion users. We build low-cost, modular API infrastructure so that you can go live with a fintech product or service in a matter of days, not months. For more information, please visit www.setu.co
Pine Labs is a leading merchant commerce omnichannel platform operating across India and Southeast Asia. Pine Labs’ tech-first approach to digital payments and focus on simplification at the front end aims to help many businesses embrace fintech products at scale. In digital payments, our online payments cloud-based software Plural represents a one-stop payments destination across channels. Plural is designed to deliver secure and frictionless online payment experiences to the end user, powered by an advanced tech stack that can augment an existing online business or build an all-new e-commerce payment setup from the ground up. In issuing, Qwikcilver serves leading corporates, Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) brands, e-commerce companies, the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector and the airlines industry, with a presence across India, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Australia. Qwikcilver is a go-to gift card provider among companies looking to, among other things, bolster their employee rewards program and issue closed-loop gift cards for customer acquisition. In consumer app, Fave is a fintech platform for the next generation of consumers, providing smart payments and savings, while empowering merchants with a loyalty solution to grow and engage with their customers in a whole new way. Incorporated in Singapore, the key investors of Pine Labs include Sequoia India, Actis Capital, Temasek, PayPal and Mastercard.