The south east Asian ride-hailing company, Grab, announced that it has acquired the Bengaluru-based startup, iKaaz. The acquisition is aimed at expanding Grab’s digital payments platform, GrabPay. The company however is yet to disclose the financial details of the acquisition deal. The news comes after Grab bought the Indonesian online payment platform startup Kudo, last year.

Grab, whose main competitor is Uber Technologies, currently renders services in countries like Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Cambodia.

According to Grab, the flexibility and scalability of iKaaz’s technology makes the company suitable to cater to Southeast Asia’s huge payment landscape and largely unbanked population. Currently the GrabPay payments platform facilitates approximately 3.5 million transactions on a daily basis and over one billion transactions on an annual basis.

iKaaz was launched in 2014 and its technology aimed at enabling high speed effortless payments for merchants across the country given the challenges prevalent in Internet connectivity across the nation. The startups technology encompasses areas like NFC, QR-code, audio based payments in addition to bill payments, online payments and peer-to-peer technology.

As per a statement released by the company, “the rich functionality of iKaaz’s mobile payments platform and its experienced leadership team will accelerate feature development and partner integration of GrabPay.”

Once the acquisition process is completed, the iKaaz team will join Grab’s Bengaluru-based research and development centre, which was established last year as a centre of excellence for payments. The centre currently employs 75 engineers and Grab plans to hire an additional 200 by the end of 2018. The Bengaluru centre is one of the six such centres that exist globally.

“We look forward to leveraging the expertise of iKaaz’s leadership team and build GrabPay into Southeast Asia’s universal payments platform together,” said Jason Thompson, Managing Director, GrabPay Southeast Asia.

(Picture courtesy: s3.reutersmedia.net)