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On Tuesday, Pine Labs announced the acquisition of Fave, a start-up in South-East Asia. The transaction was valued at $45 million to enhance its consumer-oriented offerings and services in domestic and international markets.
About the taken-over company- Fave.
Fave is a company that helps an offline trader login and keep leads using gift cards and cheques and similar marketing campaigns. The startup allows merchants to accept digital payments in a transparent manner by asking a customer to scan a simple QR code. Once the payment is successful, the prospect automatically receives a cashback/loyalty point via the Fave application that cannot be exchanged for this specific activity during future transactions.
Fave co-founder and CEO Joel Neoh said: Clients love us because they receive money safely, cashback, and rewards to be on the platform. And retailers like us because they have a lot of new and regular customers.”
The company Pine Labs is backed by one of the popular investors which is Sequoia Capital India. The five-year Fave, which started as a fitness subscription service has expanded exponentially. Since then, it has raised more than $32 million before it was bought.
The CEO of Pine Labs Amrish Rau said in the recent interview that this new offering turned out to be quite beneficial and proven useful to merchants in the pandemic as they struggle for ways to drive sales from existing customers. Consumers as well were looking for ways to save or optimize their purchases.
In 2019, Pine Labs made an acquisition that offers payment terminals, invoicing tools and working capital.
Meanwhile, Rau brought comparisons between Fave and Honey and said Southeast Asia startups did to offline businesses what PayPal business units did in the world dominated by digital.
He also added- “For the first time with QR, what I realized was you can do a wonderful job when it comes to loyalty, rewards, and redemption in the offline world”.
He said the leadership and functionality of Fave will continue as before only, and the workforce is working to bring Fave’s offerings to prospects in approximately 3,700 Indian cities. This would be the first time that a southeast Asian start-up would launch its services in the Indian market.
Neoh said- for this, we will be opening more vacancies, and planning to hire 100 employees, and also plans to launch a buy now and pay later product service in the coming two months in 2021.
The company explored and discovered several opportunities, thereby gaining a wider clientele by offering better solutions and facilitating their daily lives.
Neoh said: India has the digital advantage with young demographics, ambitious middle-class growth with rising disposable income, and growing digital literacy. We believe that the ACPA electronic payments landscape will continue to grow exponentially over the next decade. Together, we are going to be stronger, faster, and better.”
The firm is planning to launch the Fave offerings within 30 days with QR code transactions, and then Rau added- the team will work with Pine Labs’ merchants’ community to deliver vouchers, gift cards, and follow up the marketing campaign to the Indian audience base.
Rau said while pointing out the work- “After looking at the company for nine to ten months, I thought it was time for us to do something more important and strategic.”
This new acquisition will help Pine Labs make further incursions into the wider consumer space and strengthen the consumer base. Both the firms together will focus on two strains- First is to bridge the gap between offline and online payments and business applications where Pine Labs’ prepaid cards product could be leveraged smoothly.
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