PayU acquires Zooz to take on international payment services

A week after PayPal led a $50 million round in the cross-border payment specialist PPRO, one of its big competitors in the developing world has announced an acquisition of its own in the same space. PayU — the payments division of Naspers that is sometimes described as the PayPal of the developing world — has acquired Zooz, a startup based out of Israel that provides an API to merchants that lets them accept a variety of payments depending on the market.

The two had already been working together — specifically to provide PayU payment options to merchants in markets where PayU is active — and the plan will be to integrate the services further to enable PayU to step deeper into the cross-border payment services space, potentially even by enabling the integration of the payment methods of competitors as part of the mix of payment options.

“In the choice between building a closed walled garden and open platform, we decided to go with the second model,” PayU’s CEO Laurent le Moal said in an interview. “The reality is that you need to be neutral and work with everyone.”

PayU will also invest in adding further features to the Zooz platform, such as fraud management (which you could argue is table stakes these days in payments), real-time reporting and smart routing.

Zooz’s whole team of 70 will be joining, including co-founders Oren Levy (CEO) and Ronen Morecki (CTO), who will respectively take senior roles at PayU as business development with larger merchants, and CTO of innovation.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but that PayU has said that this deal brings its total spend on acquisitions and investments to about $350 million to date. That includes acquiring CitrusPay for $130 million, investing €100 million (between $120 million and $130 million) in Kreditech and several other investments. Doing the math, this potentially puts this deal at a range of between $50 million and $100 million.

Zooz was founded in 2010 and had raised around $33 million, from investors that include Target Global Ventures, Fang Fund, iAngels, Kreos Capital and existing investors Blumberg Capital, lool ventures, Rhodium, Claltech (Access Industries’ Israeli tech vehicle), XSeed Capital, CampOne Ventures and angel investor Eilon Tirosh.

Similar to PPRO, the company in which PayPal invested earlier this month, Zooz’s service addresses the widespread fragmentation that exists in payments globally. While credit cards are very much the norm in the US, globally they account for just under 20 percent of all e-commerce transactions, with consumers and businesses in different geographies developing their own localised payment methods and preferences. For example, cash on delivery or deposited with convenience stores, or bank transfers also play big roles.

This can be a problem for a merchant that is based in one country but interested in selling to people in another — an opportunity estimated to be worth $994 billion globally — if it doesn’t accept whatever the local payment method happens to be. Zooz addresses this by providing an API to merchants that gives them the option of a number of payment providing companies and methods so that they can enable the most popular variety of payment options to buyers depending on the market.

It will be worth watching whether payment companies will continue to be happy integrating with Zooz after its sale to PayU is complete. The fact that Zooz already integrates with different payment options, and itself is not a payment services provider, was one reason why PayU was interested in it.

At a time when there are multiple options for payment methods, including PayU itself, there is potentially an opportunity to be able to make revenues by trying to play in as many of those transactions as possible. Notably, PayU already lets people integrate some 250 methods into its own wallet, and it says it’s the leading online payment service provider in 16 markets out of the 17 in which it is active..

Zooz potentially will be boosting that footprint with more than just a platform that enables multiple payment options, but the transaction data and analytics that come with those transactions, which can become useful for other services in other parts of the business.

“The unique contribution we bring to PayU is an advanced technological layer which not only helps merchants worldwide to upscale their operations and provide a better customer experience, but also offers analytics and optimization capabilities that equip them with unprecedented insights,” noted Levy, Zooz’s CEO