Soon, pay foreign merchants online via PayU Biz or e-wallets

You may soon be able to use Net banking or even e-wallets to make online purchases from foreign merchants.

In the next few months, PayU Biz will channel payments to foreign merchants, Rahul Kothari, Business Head, PayU Biz, said.

Currently, none of the Indian payment gateways has cross-border arrangements whereby they can accept payments to foreign merchants.

Hence, most Indian customers can only use their credit cards or, at best, some top-end debit cards for their online purchases with foreign merchants.

They cannot use Net banking, e-wallet, or the equated monthly instalment facility to make payments to foreign merchants.

This situation may change with the Reserve Bank of India recently allowing — with certain constraints — Indian gateways to accept payments to foreign merchants.

“We want to expand our cross-border business. We will do the full roll-out of this facility in a month or two. We already have a pipeline of foreign merchants.

“We are also working with some logistics providers who could be our merchant acquisition channel,” Kothari said.

Kothari said that estimated size of cross-border services market is about $1 billion.

PayU Biz, part of PayU India that is backed by NASPERS Group, aspires to process transactions worth $1 billion every month and have a merchant base of 15,000 by the end of this fiscal, Kothari said.

Currently, this enterprise payments business processes transactions worth $500 million every month and caters to a merchant base of 10,000.

PayU Biz is the biggest payment gateway aggregator in e-commerce industry in India. As many as 90 out of the top 100 e-commerce merchants are PayU Biz customers, Kothari said.

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