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PhonePe acquires PoS platform Zopper
MUMBAI: Flipkart-owned digital payments platform PhonePe, yesterday, announced that it has acquired Zopper Retail, a hyperlocal point-of-sale platform for small and medium businesses. As part of the acquisition, Neeraj Jain, founder-CEO, Zopper will join the PhonePe team as head of product, offline merchant solutions.
The acquisition of Zopper is part of PhonePe’s aggressive strategy to build its offline payments business and thereby expand its customer base. With this acquisition, the Flipkart-owned digital payments company will hope to merge the value-added service capabilities of Zopper into its platform, thereby strengthening its offline proposition for merchants.
“Zopper has a very strong technology and innovation DNA, and Neeraj and team are also a great culture fit for PhonePe. Zopper Retail is specifically designed to meet the needs of millions of small retailers in India, and their strategy ties in very well with our overall vision of making digital payments universally accepted across the country,” said PhonePe CEO Sameer Nigam as quoted by Inc 42.
Flipkart’s co-founders Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal had also made angel investments in Zopper in 2012. Founded in 2010, Zopper was initially a community-based product review site which then pivoted into a hyperlocal e-commerce site. In 2015-16, Zopper pivoted again and split its business into two distinct divisions – a Point of Sale (Pos) platform for offline merchants (Zopper Retail) and an extended warranty solutions unit for electronics purchased at offline outlets (Zopper Assure).
Last year, Flipkart made a commitment that it will invest $500 million in PhonePe to fight off competition. The acquisition will help the firm in the intensely competitive payments platform segment. Amongst its biggest competitors are India’s biggest payment company Paytm and Google’s Tez.
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Paytm taps Ujas Shah as vice president for sales, business development
Veteran executive to drive swiping devices and merchant-led growth
BENGALURU: Paytm has appointed Ujas Shah as vice president—sales business development, reinforcing its push to scale offline payments and device-led monetisation as competition in fintech intensifies.
In the role, Shah will lead business development for swiping devices, shape go-to-market strategy and oversee profit-and-loss execution across Paytm’s offline payments stack. His remit includes expanding distribution, tightening merchant lifecycle management and rolling out KPI-led sales systems aimed at improving acquisition and retention.
The appointment reads like an operational signal from the top: execution, discipline and scale now matter as much as growth. Industry executives say device-led payments, long viewed as margin accretive, are back in sharp focus.
Shah is a long-standing Paytm executive, having previously served as national sales head, assistant vice president and general manager for sales. Before joining the company, he held senior roles at Kinara Capital, where he was field sales head, and earlier at Idea Cellular, Tata Teleservices, Samsung Electronics and Asian Paints.
His two decades across telecom, consumer and fintech businesses give him a rare, cross-sector view of distribution-heavy models: an asset as Paytm looks to extract more value from its merchant base amid tighter capital and higher investor scrutiny.
