American online payment giant PayPal said Friday it is wrapping up its payment operations in India to focus on processing cross-border trade for small businesses in the world’s second-largest populated country.
“From 1 April 2021, we will focus all our attention on enabling more international sales for Indian businesses, and shift focus away from our domestic products in India. This means we will no longer offer domestic payment services within India from 1 April,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The company said its Indian merchant partners have time till April 1 to terminate their contracts. Online businesses including event ticketing platform BookMyShow, travel ticketing service MakeMyTrip, and food and grocery delivery major Swiggy, among others use PayPal’s payment gateway service for faster checkout.
Last year, PayPal had said it would invest in the country to build peer-to-peer payment service by tapping into India’s indigenous payment network UPI (Unified Payments Interface).
In an interaction with local media Economic Times, PayPal chief technology officer Sri Shivananda, had said India is a critical market for the company and plans to be in the country for long term. “There’s a lot that we are doing in terms of working with the local ecosystem, including the government and the regulators.”
PayPal, that has been running cross-border payments operation in India for more than a decade, said last year it processed international sales worth USD 1.4 billion for Indian merchants. In its statement, the company said it will continue to invest in product development to enable Indian businesses reach its over 300 million global consumers.
India’s apex bank Reserve Bank of India said the Indian businesses in 2019, received USD 83 billion and USD 27.4 billion during the first half of 2020, making the country the largest recipient of inbound remittances in the world.
Seeing the spike in such transactions, Indian digital payment startups such as Razorpay and Cashfree have also rolled out their offering for local merchants to accept payment from global clients.