Cashfree Payments: Cashfree Payments acquires one-click checkout platform Zecpe

State Bank of India (SBI)-backed Cashfree Payments has made its second acquisition through one-click checkout company, Zecpe, the company said on Tuesday. The acquisition is expected to help Cashfree enhance its offerings for direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands as it looks to help businesses improve conversions through quick checkouts.

Cashfree is also looking to add capabilities such as – return to origin (RTO) reduction on returns, fraud detection, and address pre-filling, among others – to improve shopping experiences for consumers of partnered D2C brands.

Prior to this, Cashfree had picked up a majority stake in UAE-based payment solution provider, Telr, in 2021 for $15 million, to expand into Middle East markets and bolster its cross-border payment capabilities.

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The acquisition comes at a time when Cashfree has been banned from onboarding new users for payment gateway services by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Others like rival Razorpay too have been paused from bringing new users in as the central bank asked the Bengaluru-based startup to undergo fresh audits.

Amid the ongoing funding crunch, Cashfree laid off close to 100 employees in January, this year, to reduce its burn, ETtech first reported.

“We see immense synergies between our existing products and the solutions offered by Zecpe, making it an excellent addition to our D2C Payments Suite enabled for e-commerce businesses. We are certain that this acquisition will strengthen our D2C one-click checkout capabilities and further elevate our leadership position in the SMB space,” said Akash Sinha, chief executive and cofounder, Cashfree Payments. As a part of the transaction, Zecpe founder Hriday Agarwal along with his team will be joining Cashfree Payments. Agarwal will be heading the ecommerce checkout division for the payments provider, with his team helping scale the checkout offering further.

“D2C space is exploding in India and presents a fantastic opportunity to help ecommerce players increase their conversion rates and reduce cash-on-delivery (COD) fraud and returns. We see a natural fitment with Cashfree Payments’ payments stack,” said Agarwal.

Earlier this week, consumer fintech Cred, announced its foray into the buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) space with Cred Flash, to help consumers with more convenient and faster checkout experiences on the app, as well as on other online merchant platforms including Swiggy, Zepto, Urban Company, Licious, among others.

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