Cashfree Payments acquires Zecpe in latest acquisition

Cashfree Payments has acquired one-click checkout company Zecpe, its second buyout after it picked up a majority stake in UAE-based payment solution provider Telr in 2021 for $15 million.

The latest 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 the shopping experiences of consumers of D2C brand partners.


The acquisition also comes at a time when Cashfree has been barred from onboarding new users for payment gateway services, as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has asked it and rival Razorpay to undergo fresh audits.

The company fired nearly 100 employees in January to reduce its cash burn, ET has 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, cofounder and chief executive, Cashfree Payments.

As part of the transaction, Zecpe founder Hriday Agarwal along with his team will join Cashfree Payments.

Also read | Exclusive: Rivals snag new users as top payment gateways hit by RBI freeze

Agarwal will head the ecommerce checkout division for the payments provider, with his team helping scale the checkout offering further.

"The 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, etc.

At present, Cashfree Payments said it powers over 300,000 merchants, helping them to collect payments and make payouts via all available methods. Some big brands associated with the payments provider include Nykaa, Firstcry, Nature's Basket, BigBasket, Zomato, Noise, among others.

It also said it processes $40 billion in total payments value annually.