India’s first listed e-commerce entity, Infibeam Avenues is doubling down on its fintech play with an investment of Rs 250 crore to build a backend blockchain enabled fintech platform catering to BFSIs, SMBs, and corporates.
The move is in line with the company’s continued focus to divest its non-core businesses including consumer marketplace (B2C) and broadband satellite communications services to focus on riding the financial inclusion wave and provide fintech solutions to fast-growing new small and medium businesses entrances in ecommerce space, Vishal Mehta, CMD, Infibeam Avenues told ET.
Infibeam, which started as a consumer facing e-commerce marketplace in 2007, has over the last one year acquired CCAvenue a multi-channel payment processing services, online digital payment processing company – Vavian International for $1.2 million, and picked up 48% stake in Mumbai-based Go Payments in a bid to further strengthen its fintech play. Mehta said Infibeam will focus on building infrastructure and service computers for secure data storage.
Its infrastructure will have Cloud-based Tier-3 Datacenter, thus able to provide real-time high-speed data computing & storage, with no downtime. The fund drawn from the proceed of its IPO. “With the data localization law coming in we have an opportunity to provide to others our facilities as demand surges,” he said.
In 2016, Infibeam invested Rs 250 crore to purchase — 16 floors of GIFT city tower at Gandhinagar, to build a cloud data centre and technologies capabilities for captive use.
Recently, Infibeam and IBM India collaborated to develop blockchain capabilities on LinuxONE for the first time in India.
Last week, Infibeam said its net profit grew to Rs 26.6 crore during the December 2018 quarter at a revenue of Rs 150.3 crore owing to strong traction in the payments business, and synergies across its cloud platforms. Infibeam’s stock closed at Rs 39.50 last week on Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE).
In December, Mumbai based payments entity Suvidhaa Infoserve invested Rs 25 crore to acquire 5% stake in Infibeam.com. After this deal, Infibeam.com the B2C marketplace will be managed by Suvidhaa. While in January this year, it also sold it’s wholly owned subsidiary Infinium (India) Ltd, a broadband satellite communications services business to Tradohub, a industrial good aggregator.
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