Visa Makes Strategic Investment In Paidy

Visa has made a strategic investment in Paidy, which offers instantly issued post-pay credit services for eCommerce consumers based in Japan.

The firms said in an announcement on Friday (August 24) that they are working together on “new digital payment experiences” that, in turn, seek to offer consumers in that country more options as they transact in-store or online.

The investment, which remained unquantified in the release, was part of a Series C financing that came in July, and which had been announced at $55 million. The round was led by ITOCHU Corp., with participation from Goldman Sachs.

Paidy has more than 1.5 million users, according to Friday’s release.

As noted in the announcement, consumers using Paidy conduct transactions using a mobile phone and email address (with verification established through SMS). Thus, Paidy does not require pre-registration or a card. Purchases are settled through a monthly bill.

In remarks that accompanied the announcement, Chris Clark, regional president of Asia-Pacific, Visa, said, “We have been following Paidy’s progress and the enhanced shopping experience they provide at the time of purchase. In Japan, there is enormous opportunity to bring consumers more options to pay, whether all at once or in installments, especially when shopping across multiple channels. We look forward to this partnership to deliver these kind of new experiences.”

In his own remarks, Russell Cummer, founder and executive chairman of Paidy, said that “through this tie-up, we expect to deliver Paidy’s frictionless and intuitive transactional credit to a much broader audience.”

The firms noted that in 2017, the eCommerce market in Japan grew 9.1 percent year over year to 16.5 trillion yen — and yet, the market is still heavily reliant on cash.

In an interview with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster that followed the aforementioned Series C round,  Cummer stated that the company aims to increase its user count to 11 million by 2020.