PayU-BillDesk: How will India’s biggest fintech deal pan out?

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Editor's note: Yesterday was a big day in the Indian fintech scene. BillDesk, one of the oldest payment processing companies in the country, has agreed to get acquired by rival PayU in what is being hailed as the biggest fintech deal in India. On Tuesday, Prosus NV—the investment arm of the Naspers group, which owns PayU—announced that “an agreement has been reached between PayU and the shareholders of the Indian digital payments provider BillDesk to acquire BillDesk for $4.7 billion”. The deal will bring Prosus’s cumulative investment in the Indian tech ecosystem to more than $10 billion. The deal price is about 20 times BillDesk’s annual revenue, which sounds huge, but several industry experts believe that with the pace at which India is moving online in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it could have been even bigger. “If BillDesk would have decided to list now, it would have a bigger valuation in the public market currently,” says a payments industry veteran. “Not the founders, but the investors of BillDesk had been in the market to find a buyer for the last …