US-based payment technology firm Visa has invested in India-based online payments and bill payments platform, BillDesk.

Visa

Image: Visa’s headquarters in Foster City, California. Photo: Courtesy of Coolcaesar/Wikipedia.org.

Visa believes that its investment and collaboration can help BillDesk to develop product lines for its payments and loyalty businesses and also help in expanding its footprint across other geographies.

The US-based firm said that its investment in BillDesk is not expected to have any impact on its Indian business arm, but it is subject to statutory regulatory approvals.

“This is Visa’s latest partnership and investment with emerging payment innovators. As a global payments technology company, Visa continually partners with technology and financial services businesses across the world – especially those that have the potential to advance digital payments growth for clients and customers,” Visa said in a statement.

Previously, Visa invested in Paidy, Behalf, Marqeta, Payworks, Klarna, LoopPay (acquired by Samsung), Square and Stripe, among others.

Visa Asia Pacific regional president, Chris Clark said: “As a leading payments player in India, BillDesk has been a long time business partner to Visa. Having worked with BillDesk’s founders over the years, the Visa leadership has been consistently impressed with their vision, market knowledge and execution capabilities, as well as alignment on values.

“This investment further reinforces our long-term commitment to India’s digital payments growth story.”

BillDesk co-founder MN Srinivasu said: “We are truly excited by this investment from the world’s largest global payment network, Visa.

“We now look forward to building new products and solutions that benefit merchants as well as consumers. Visa with its deep network and strong relationships is a great partner as well looking to offer our services in other markets.”

Last month, Visa invested in Conductor, a digital payments processing technology firm in Brazil, to help accelerate payments and to enable its expansion in the country.

The investment reinforces its existing partnership between the two companies and its shared vision to bring the adoption of digital payments across e-commerce and mobile commerce in the country.

The two companies focus mainly on issuer-focused solutions for tokenizing payments via mobile wallets, improving access to Visa APIs, expanding the usage of push payments with Visa Direct, and increasing acceptance of digital payments among small and medium businesses, among other initiatives.