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SBI-backed payment solutions major Pine Labs expect its payment gateway Plural to become a $5 billion payment volume processing business in the next two years.
Speaking to businessline, Kush Mehra, Chief Business Officer of Pine Labs, said: “I feel that Plural’s growth journey is very significant. In the last 18 months, we were run rating at about $300-400 million on a monthly transaction basis in terms of dollars processed on Plural. We have over 200 significant large merchants, who have tied up with us and our pipeline continues to be very strong. In the POS (point-of-sale) space, it took us 6-7 years to become $5 billion annualised payment volume business. Plural will reach there in less than two years, so it’s a great scale up.”
He added that the story of the acceptance of online payments is coming out to be much faster because of multiple tailwinds and the market being much more conducive. Started in 1998 as a POS provider, Pine Labs forayed into payment gateway space in 2021 and competes with the likes of Razorpay, and PayU in the segment.
Aggregated business
Commenting on the competition, Mehra said: “We have realised that India as a market is really huge, which needs to be solved by not just two, but at least five large online payment gateway companies. Plural has the same same capabilities that PineLabs offers in the offline world. We actually replicated them onto our Plural payment gateway product and on day one, we enabled more than 100 odd types of payment transactions.”
Further, talking about aggregated business, Mehra noted that the company is recording net revenues of over $200 million in this financial year and is profitable. Pine Labs said that it will continue to grow at about a 45-50 per cent growth rate at an aggregated level and operates at almost about 70 per cent of gross margins and gross profits.
In large enterprise merchant chains segment, Pine Labs has a POS market share of 75-80 per cent. Pine Labs said it has close to 900,000 to 1 million merchant touch points and the market has 6 million merchants with POS touch points - so the company currently holds about 18-20 per cent market share.
Going ahead, Pine Labs is focussed on increasing its share in the small merchant categories. Mehra noted that two years ago, about 20 per cent of Pine Labs’ monthly merchant additions used to come from small merchant category. Today, almost 70 per cent of Pine Labs’ sourcing has started to come from small merchants category. “Currently, we onboard 30,000 new merchant touch points every month and in the next few months we want to take this up to 40,000-45,000 merchants,” he added.
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