Amazon Makes a Play for India’s Mobile Payments Market with Tapzo Buy

The Indian mobile payments market is a major new development. Created by the combination of a massive market—over a billion people at last report—and the bizarre move of demonetization, mobile payments have taken on a whole new importance. We’ve seen it just recently with Google’s Tez system, which some believe will make Google the largest mobile payments provider around. Google isn’t alone in the field, however, as Amazon demonstrated with its recent purchase of Tapzo.

Thanks to the deal, Tapzo is now valued somewhere between $35 million and $40 million, which isn’t bad at all for a recent startup. Since Tapzo aggregates a series of 35 apps, including Ola, Swiggy and Uber, it should help give Amazon a real leg up in the mobile payments space. Tapzo’s offerings reach into several segments, including food delivery and cab hailing, two major uses for mobile payments.

Amazon is expected to keep most of if not all of the Tapzo team, and put them all to work giving Amazon Pay a boost in the field. Since the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has a policy in place that requires local company data to be stored entirely within the country, the purchase of local firms may be exactly what major operations like Amazon—or Google, and so on—need to meet the rules quickly and get back to work.

It’s not outlandish that major multinational operations like Amazon, Google, Apple and the rest would want to get ahead, and a piece of the Indian market looks like a great way to get there. While a good chunk of those people are living on amounts so meager Americans wouldn’t stop to pick them up if found in the street, there’s still plenty of middle-class users out there who need mobile payments systems. With even beggars increasingly turning to mobile payments—which we’ve seen in China routinely—getting any part of the action can mean big money to a company when millions of users are involved.

Since mobile payments requires little once the app has been created, even small amounts of earnings are often contributors to profit. Amazon is likely eager to get a piece of the Indian market, and it’s well on its way to doing so.