India and Singapore are working to link both the countries’ national payment systems, to enable cross-border payments of funds. The linking of the “PayNow” interface of Singapore, and the “Unified Payments Interface” of India is to be completed by July 2022 and would enable residents to easily transfer small funds to each other even through mobile numbers. In April 2021, Singapore inked a similar pact with Thailand’s PromptPay.
Indian startup Groww is in talks for a new financing round to raise funds at a $3B valuation. According to reports, the investing Platform is looking to raise up to $250M from the round, which could close within weeks. While the terms of the deal are subject to change, the startup is also looking to internally expand into cryptocurrency but hasn’t made any firm decisions as to when it will offer such trading options.
Source: Techcrunch
Swedish Caller-ID service TrueCaller said it wants to raise $116M in an initial public offering at the NASDAQ Stockholm. According to reports, the company plans to do its listing by the fourth quarter and is aiming for a $3B valuation in the IPO. With India as its biggest market, the firm has over 278M active monthly users and has raised up to $95M over the years through various funding rounds, with Sequoia Capital and Atomico, amongst its investors.
Source: Techcrunch
A host of Indian formal sector companies resorted to wage cuts in Q1, to protect their profits in the pandemic. The “weak” wage growth will prove to be a hindrance in economic recovery by affecting household consumption, said a report by India Ratings and Research. The report was based on a study of the standalone financials of 2036 corporations. Half of those 2036 companies have reported negative growth in Q1FY22 compared to Q1FY21.
Source: Business Standard
Microsoft has announced a “multi-year strategic alliance” with India’s hotel chain Oyo, aiming to develop “next-gen” travel and hospitality products. Microsoft invested $5M in Oyo last month, taking the startup’s valuation to $9.6B. Oyo will use Microsoft Azure for its cloud-based needs and develop solutions with help from Microsoft for its small and medium-sized hotel clients.
Source: Techcrunch
Adobe has announced the appointment of Prativa Mohapatra as its Vice President and Managing Director for India operations. Succeeding Kulmeet Bawa, she will lead Adobe’s India business across Adobe Creative Cloud, Experience Cloud and Document Cloud. Starting her career at PwC India, she has over 25 years of experience and was previously working for IBM as their VP of Digital Sales for APAC.
Source: Business Today
Hiring in India is increasing, with pandemic restrictions gradually reduced, and witnessed a 65% jump over pre-Covid 2019 levels. But this rise is driven by job switchers, and not by new entrants into the industry, according to Labour Market Update by LinkedIn. With the economy evolving, new jobs are emerging such as Cloud and Data Analysis, and the transition into them has been from non-emerging roles (54% for Cloud, 57% for Data Analysis).
Source: ET HRWorld
Power infra firm Techno Electric and Engineering Company is planning to invest $1B in setting up data centers in key Indian cities. The Kolkata-based firm wants to build data centers backed by green energy in Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, and NCR. Two projects at Chennai and Kolkata are being developed currently, with a load capacity of 45-60MW each, and will together have around $340M investment of the total $1B planned.
Source: Communication Today
Amazon Pay has announced that it now has over five crore customers using its payment platform in India. To celebrate this, Amazon Pay is offering rewards to its users across Sept. Over 75% of its customers were using Amazon Pay UPI in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, the company claimed, highlighting the ever-growing reach of UPI and digital money. Amazon Pay can now be used in recharging DTH, phone, etc. besides in regular payments.
Source: FPJ
