Naspers’s fintech business PayU buys Singapore-based Red Dot Payment

SA-based technology giant Naspers is expanding its presence in Asia. 

The company’s payments and fintech business, PayU, on Friday announced its acquisition of a majority stake in Red Dot Payment (RDP), a Southeast Asia-focused online payments business. The deal values RDP at $65m.

PayU CEO Laurent le Moal said the investment was PayU’s “first step towards expansion in the Southeast Asia region”.

“We will now provide our existing global merchants access to Southeast Asia with a single application programming interface [API] integration, thus strengthening our global PayU hub platform,” he said. 

Naspers said the deal brought PayU’s total investments in fintech, including mergers and acquisitions, to more than $700m over the past three years. 

In June, PayU agreed to buy Turkish digital payments company Iyzico for $165m in its biggest fintech acquisition to date. 

Southeast Asia is one of the fastest growing digital payments markets in the world, and is expected to triple in size to $240bn in total payments volumes by 2025, according to a Google-Temasek study. 

Naspers, which holds a 31% stake in Chinese internet group Tencent, will move its internet businesses to a new Amsterdam-listed company later in 2019. 

gavazam@businesslive.co.za