Another FinTech start-up purchased by a financial services giant! PayU expands to Israel through ZOOZ

PayU, the leading financial services provider in global growth markets, announced the acquisition of ZOOZ, the payment technology platform that operates in Israel. The transaction supports the continued expansion of PayU in emerging markets and targets the USD 994 billion opportunity for cross-border payments.

The value of the ZOOZ acquisition is undisclosed, but it brings the total amount of investments and PayU’s global fintech purchases to over USD 350 million since the company began a series of global strategic moves in 2016 to open access to financial services. “The acquisition comes after a productive partnership between PayU and ZOOZ, which has already benefited traders selling their products in Romania. Closer cooperation will help improve the PayU Hub and will continue to support online stores that want to expand in Romania and beyond the country,” says Marius Costin, country manager of PayU Romania.

The ZOOZ and PayU teams will work together to create the world’s most important global payment infrastructure for the future. As part of this vision, they will develop the ‘Payment Platform’, a modular and highly flexible payment platform that can support the evolution of online commerce and the expanding needs of the payment industry. The first features include fraud management and real-time reporting or smart routing to further help develop global merchants.

The transaction is selling after a successful partnership that for the first time offered PayU merchants such as Gett and Kiwi.com access to 2.3 billion new emerging market customers via the ZOOZ PayU Hub platform.

As part of the partnership, at the end of summer 2018, ZOOZ co-founder and CEO, Oren Levy and CTO Ronen Morecki will become part of the global PayU Leadership team, focusing on technology and business development. The ZOOZ team of 70 technical and payment experts will also become part of the PayU team, helping to increase the company’s technical capabilities.

“PayU is one of the most active investors in fintech space and we are always looking for opportunities to innovate and support the growth of traders in our portfolio. Today’s announcement perfectly illustrates this philosophy in action and we are pleased to receive the ZOOZ team and more in the PayU world. Working together to create the first platform, we’ll get even closer to PayU’s mission to help build a world without financial borders,” said Laurent le Moal, CEO of PayU.

Oren Levy, co-founder and CEO of ZOOZ, added: “After a one year productive partnership, our common vision of creating a new global standard in payment infrastructure becomes reality through the acquisition of ZOOZ by PayU. we bring it into PayU is an advanced technology layer that not only helps retailers around the world to improve their operations and provide better experience to their customers, but also offers analytics and optimization capabilities that give them unprecedented insights.”

With the cross-border trade expected to reach USD 994 billion in 2020, nearly two-thirds of cross-border business will come from emerging markets such as Asia and Latin America, according to an Accenture report. Alternative payment methods still account for two-thirds of all payments in these markets.

ZOOZ was founded in 2010 by Oren Levy and Ronen Morecki and has become one of Israel’s most popular payment technology players. The company provides a data-driven payment platform that consolidates and analyzes all payment data to provide valuable information to merchants, enabling them to personalize customer experiences online and in-store

PayU is part of Naspers, a global group of online and entertainment platforms and one of the world’s largest technology investors. After the transaction, ZOOZ will be wholly owned by Naspers, consolidating the group’s pay division and supporting its strategy to develop the footprint of financial services in emerging markets with long-term growth potential.

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