Ecommerce giant Amazon invests 225 crore in its Indian digital payments business, bolstering its competition with Walmart-owned PhonePe, Paytm, and Google's mobile payment service Google Pay.

The funding for Amazon Pay has been acquired from Singapore-based Amazon Corporate Holdings Private Limited and Mauritius-based entity Amazon.com.incs Limited Company, as per to the regulatory documents sourced by business intelligence platform Tofler.

Amazon Pay also obtained another 225 crore in March this year from the same entities. The fresh funding raises the total capital infusion in Amazon Pay to 450 crore this year, at a time when the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic has further elevated the adoption of e-commerce and digital payments.

In October 2020, ahead of the festive season, Amazon had invested 700 crore in Amazon Pay.

Indian Digital payments would rise fivefold to reach $1 trillion by 2023, led by the growth in mobile payments, according to financial services company Credit Suisse’s report.

The competition in the digital payments space is heating up. In April this year, Amazon Pay, said it has empowered over 5 million neighbourhood stores and businesses with its digital payments infrastructure. These SMBs (small and medium businesses), most of whom earlier transacted only in cash, can now accept payments from their customers using Amazon Pay’s QR (quick response) code.