News Roundup: 8 Indian Startup News That You Don’t Want To Miss This Week [18-23 Dec]

We bring to you the weekly dose of important Indian startup news of the week.

Once again, Paytm was the biggest newsmaker in the Indian startup ecosystem. This week, the Indian startup made three announcements. The company announced that its QR feature now allows offline merchants to accept unlimited payments directly to their bank accounts at 0% charge. The company is gearing up to invest $77.75 Mn (INR 500 Cr) over the next 12 months to conduct merchant training and awareness initiatives.

It also introduced ‘Paytm Loyalty Points’ that can be accumulated by its users and can be used in all platforms and the offline merchant base of Paytm. Furthermore, the digital payments giant is gearing up to add more features to its loyalty programme in the coming few days.

The last development was mainly pertaining to the founder and CEO of Paytm, Vijay Shekhar Sharma. He pledged about 5% of his personal holding in Paytm Mall for the ESOP pool. This move would add about $50 Mn worth of stocks to the ESOP corpus, which will then become almost 10% of the overall company. As per regulatory filings for the financial year, 2017, with the Registrar of Companies, Sharma who had over 19% stake in Paytm Mall now owns about 14% stake.

Important Indian Startup Stories Of The Week

Government To Bear MDR Charges On Payments Up To INR 2000

In order to encourage small shops to accept digital payments, the government has decided to bear the charges merchants pay to banks i.e-the merchant discount rate (MDR), on purchases of up to $31(INR 2,000) using a debit card, BHIM or Aadhaar. While the charges for debit cards have been waived, payments by credit card will continue to attract MDR.

UIDAI Temporarily Bans Airtel From For Flouting Aadhaar Rules

Bharti Airtel and Airtel Payments Bank, the country’s first payments bank, has been temporarily banned from conducting eKYC of customers using Aadhaar. The stringent action was taken by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on the basis of allegations that the telecom major was using Aadhaar-based SIM verification of customers to open payments bank accounts without their “informed consent”

Amazon To Launch Private Smartphone Brand Tenor

The Indian arm of global ecommerce behemoth Amazon is gearing up to launch a private smartphone brand, Tenor, in January 2018. The development comes just over a month after Flipkart announced its entry into the country’s smartphone market with Billion Capture+. Amazon India had previously launched two smartphone models, Tenor E and G, in India back in September.

The company also announced that its popular membership programme, Amazon Prime has grown to encompass over 11 Mn Prime eligible products across categories in India this year, compared to the 2 Mn products it offered in 2016. The programme saw customers from over 350 cities across the country signing up in 2017.

Alibaba Cloud To Set Up Its India Data Centre

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, is all set to open its India data centre in January 2018. As part of its announcement earlier today, the company has invited clients to sign up for services to be delivered by the new data centre.

Situated in Mumbai, the India data centre will help meet the surging demand for cloud computing services among the fast-increasing number of small and medium-sized businesses in the region.

Government Imposes Regulations On Ecommerce Firms

Starting from January 1, 2018, all ecommerce firms in the country will have to display the exact MRP (as in Maximum Retail Price) of packaged products, including electronic gadgets, smartphones as well as consumer durables and non-durable goods. As per a government mandate released recently, the price details will have to be clearly mentioned both on the online platform and on the products themselves. Additionally, ecommerce companies have been ordered to display the name of the country that the products were manufactured or assembled in.

Find the complete list of all the startup news from last week →