Noida headquartered and Paypal-backed Pine Labs, which provides financing & last-mile retail transaction technology, may buy out the Asian business of debt-ridden German payments company Wirecard, reported Economic Times, citing three people aware of the talks. Pine Labs is in initial discussions currently, said the report.
Citing a person aware of the conversations, the ET report further said, "Multiple other players have also expressed interest in the company’s assets in the region. The legality of the matter still has to be seen."
Besides Pine Labs from India, there are sale enquiries from other compannies as well, as at least four major payment deployers including Hitachi Payments and Atos-backed Wordline Technology.
In a statement to ET, Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs said, Pine Labs is a leading payment and instalment provider in India and South East Asia. We continue to expand our footprints. We wouldn’t like to comment on this topic [buying Wirecard]."
It is to be noted that there are a couple of Indian lawsuits against Wirecard AG’s former COO, Jan Marsalek, who allegedly played a central role in deals that were later stucked in disputes over valuations and unpaid fees. In one of the civil cases, the previous owners of Indian payments company Hermes I-Tickets Private Ltc., are suing former COO Jan Marsalek alongside Wirecard over allegations it made false claims about past payments to the Indian firm. The lawsuits allege that ex-COO was involved in two Indian transactions.
About Pine Labs, the China's Temasek backed company is one of Asia's leading merchant commerce platforms. Last month, Pine Labs launched Pine Labs Paper POS -- an all-in-one solution for accepting multiple forms of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Bharat QR payments through a single merged static QR at the point of sale, available for merchants.