Partnership with PayU works out perfectly for co: Citrus' MD

With their scale and abilities PayU will provide Citrus Pay a completely new platform, says Citrus MD Amrish Rau after PayU took over Citrus in the largest all-cash deal in the Indian financial technology space. 

Speaking to CNBC-TV18, Rau also shared how the deal benefits both companies and will help them ride the dotcom wave and win over Indian consumers.Below is the verbatim transcript of Amrish Rau's interview to Syna Dehnugara on CNBC-TV18.Q: Tell us largest all cash deal in the fintech space as someone who is being part of the Citrus team in the last few years heading it up in India. What are the key synergies that you think PayU saw in bringing Citrus in making this acquisition? Of course, the background to this is that PayU is backed by Naspers, which is one of the biggest such conglomerates globally?A: First of all it was a very interesting time for Citrus we went out in the market. We wanted to increase our scale. We wanted to play at much higher level in the Indian fintech space. The opportunity is just massive. What we saw with PayU and with Naspers was, here was a company which shared the vision with Citrus. This was a company which had seen successes in the China market and also some of the emerging markets around the world.We felt that if we partner with somebody like PayU with their scale and their abilities Citrus get a completely new platform. Citrus largely has been a technology leader, a product leader, a fintech leader in India. PayU has been very, very significant not just in India, around the world this combination worked just perfect for us.Q: Would you say the partnership is more weighted down by the innovation as some of the products that Citrus has been developing and less by just the market share, because if you look at Paytm has about 40 percent of the market, Freecharge by some 30 percent of the market, but it actually the innovation at Citrus that has attracted PayU to it and what some of these interesting products be? Is it LazyPay, is it selfie talk us through some of these?A: This combination basically creates India’s number one payments company. We will have the controlling market share when it comes to merchants and consumers and how they use their payment services.When it comes to the way we have looked at payments in India, fintech in India we think there is going to be two major revolutions. One is credit other is also going to be in around contextual payment. At Citrus we invested heavily into the areas around contextual payments and credit. With PayU what we see as ability is to take this out into the marketplace and win the Indian consumers and also the dotcom wave, we get to ride the dotcom wave in a completely different scale and size.This becomes a very strong proposition for us and that’s where we felt that this relationship with PayU would be just wonderful for the company.Q: You take over the consolidated entity as the head of PayU in India. For you as a leader of that company what are your goals, what do you see happening in the next few months in the next half a year annually what are you looking at. It is going to be a much bigger team 1,500 people I believe now.A: Sure, we just going to continue to scale and we are going to increase in terms of our revenues, in terms of our people and also in terms of where we would want to go. From my personal point of view, I think that the move from cash to digital economy, from cash to electronic payments has just started in India. What the Indian government is doing in the last two years, what the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is doing in the last two years has been pretty much path breaking. Now it is up to us the start-up community, the innovative community in India to lap to the support that we are getting out of the government as well as from RBI and create fantastic financial technology products, which we can make a difference to the Indian middleclass and to the Indian consumer base.