1 important thing: If Bengaluru citizens woke up today and thought they were in Venice, it wouldn't have been far from the truth. Heavy rains in the past few days has overwhelmed the (already poor) city infrastructure. 

• upGrad CEO Arjun Mohan said that he had to take a tractor to reach the office today. Read on for more such anecdotes.

In today's newsletter:

• PayU-BillDesk deal gets CCI nod
• A dull festive season for e-commerce?
• MeitY's bouncer puts Wikipedia on backfoot

After weeks of delays and additional queries, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) has finally approved the $4.7 billion acquisition of payment gateway BillDesk by Naspers' PayU. 

Coming a year after the deal was announced, the approval is a relief for both parties. The sheer size of the deal had resulted in CCI seeking additional details from BillDesk and PayU.

That's not it, CCI had also reached out to competitors of PayU and BillDesk to seek their advice on the deal, according to multiple sources. Both the players compete with the likes of Razorpay, Pine Labs, Paytm, Infibeam Avenues, MSwipe etc.

• The deal is still awaiting a final regulatory nod from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

According to PayU, the two entities combined are expected to process Total Payment Values (TPV) of $147 billion as per numbers for the financial year 2020-21, the largest volume in the payment gateway industry. This is also India’s second largest internet deal after Walmart’s acquisition of Flipkart in 2018.

• The deal also brings together BillDesk’s monopoly in processing payments for government agencies and PayU’s strength in providing services to internet companies.

The competition in the online payments space refuses to slow down. After Pine Labs’ online foray and Razorpay’s offline plans, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) leader PhonePe is now launching its own payment gateway.

• The gateway will be an extension to the Walmart-backed company’s current Quick Response (QR) Code-based UPI payment service and in-app payments.

While PhonePe did not comment on the development, it has recently added a tab for its payment gateway on its website as one of its offerings for businesses.

PhonePe will be competing with the likes of Paytm, Pine Labs and Razorpay as it may look at targeting large offline players as well as small and medium businesses to offer its payment gateway to, according to sources.

The number of payment gateway operators vying for a share of payment service offerings to large businesses is growing. With the lines blurring between the experience in payments for online purchases and physical payments at stores, large players have adopted an omnichannel strategy.

Besides onboarding external merchants, a payment gateway will also help the company’s in-app payments.

It's that time of the year again. In a few weeks, different parts of the country will celebrate one festival or another every few days. It's when people spend their money on shopping. And e-commerce players attract the online crowd with bumper offers and deep discounts.

But, things aren't looking so good this time around.

Growth in festive season sales on e-commerce platforms will be muted this year due to inflation, executives and analysts said. Additionally, the resumption of offline shopping as Covid-19 eases may eat into the growth of online sales, they said.

The gross merchandise value (GMV) from festivals has been growing twice as fast as online retail in India, according to a recent report by Bernstein.

• Online festive sales grew 52 percent to $9.3 billion in the 2015-2021 period when the size of the total online retail market in the country was just over $50 billion.

Festival GMVs have ranged from 18 to 20 percent of overall GMV since 2018, which means the 4-5 week season has a disproportionate bearing on the annual sales of online marketplaces and retailers.

According to industry players, many D2C companies will take the marketplace route in order to save costs in the upcoming festive season. Another segment feeling the heat is smartphones -- shipments are expected to fall in the upcoming festive season.

"Consumer brands are clawing back their marketing and D2C spends. The idea is to leverage marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart, and Meesho and get more bang for the buck in terms of sales," said Ashvini Jakhar, founder of omnichannel warehousing company Prozo.

Always considered one of the most important levers of online retailing in India, smartphone sales are estimated to account for 40-50 percent of total sales for the biggest online commerce marketplaces.

When fast bowler Arshdeep Singh dropped a catch during the India - Pakistan match yesterday, it set off a series of cascading events that included him being brutally trolled and criticised. It also led to the ‘vandalism’ of his Wikipedia page, which was changed to term him as ‘Khalistani’. 

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has taken cognisance of the development and summoned Wikipedia executives to take their explanation on the matter, an official told us.

• The official said that there are indications that the edits were done by Pakistanis and that it could have had implications on the country’s harmony.
• It is important to note that Wikipedia pages are open to all and can be edited by anyone.

Minister of State in the IT ministry Rajeev Chandrasekhar also voiced his concern regarding the matter and said that intermediaries such as Wikipedia operating cannot permit this type of misinformation.

Union Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw, in an event, said that the government was looking to make technology providers more accountable with the introduction of the proposed Data Protection Bill, Digital India (amendment to the IT Act 2000), and a new telecom bill.

• The minister said that the idea behind making such companies more accountable for content being published was part of a global consensus among groups such as the G20.

Nandan Nilekani’s Fundamentum Partnership which is also co-founded by Ashish Kumar and Helion Ventures founder Sanjeev Aggarwal recently closed its second fund of $227 million, more than double of its first fund size of $100 million. The VC firm which targets mid-stage rounds, will also be venturing into early stage with its new fund raise.

While it utilised its first fund to invest into 6-8 start-ups over four and a half years, the new fund will be deployed across 12 start-ups over 3-3.5 years.

In an exclusive interview with Moneycontrol, Aggarwal and Kumar talks about

• The new fund's gameplan
• Sectors to watch out for
• Competition from Tiger Global and SoftBank
• Valuation mismatch of portfolio biggies like Pharmeasy
• Why it chose not to make any investment in 2021

Read the full interview

• RBI is holding consultations with a clutch of fintech companies and is said to have asked four public sector banks to run a pilot Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) project ahead of a possible rollout this financial year.
• Bitget, one of the leading derivatives exchanges, has surpassed FTX and top exchanges including KuCoin, Crypto.com, Huobi Global and more in derivatives trading volume as per data provided on CoinGecko.
• LG Electronics has released its NFT platform LG Art Lab, which lets users discover, buy, sell and trade NFTs on its smart TVs.

What is in filing a form?

Sounds like a weird question, isn't it? We fill forms everyday, for subscribing to newsletters, hospitals and well, even to unsubscribe (We hope you never unsubscribe ours!)

But as it happens, these forms could reveal a lot, going by Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s book ‘Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech’.

She takes an example of menstrual tracking apps. There are dozens available in the market. However, most of them assume that these are used by teenagers with active sex lives and want to avoid pregnancy, or women tracking their ovulation cycle for getting pregnant, leaving out the whole gamut of people inbetween - women just tracking their menstrual cycle, or women with same sex partners. In this process, many women are felt left out.

The book explains that these are hardly intentional but with increasing dependence on technology, companies need to be more inclusive. This would need a more diverse team, both gender and ethnic - more women, having black people, and transgenders.

Read the book