PayU Vijay Agicha: PayU’s chief investment officer Vijay Agicha quits

Vijay Agicha, chief investment and transformation officer of Naspers-backed PayU, has resigned from his role, multiple people aware of the matter said.Agicha might be joining an investment firm to focus on fintech investments, they said.

His departure comes a few months after Suresh Rajagopalan, former CEO of PayU-owned Wibmo, a provider of authentication services for online digital payments, left the company.

ET has reached out to PayU for comments.

PayU has witnessed significant leadership changes since selling its global operations to Israel-based fintech service provider Rapyd in August 2023.

In September 2023, Laurent Le Moal, who had served as PayU’s global CEO since 2016, stepped back from day-to-day operations while retaining an advisory role with both Prosus and PayU.

Anirban Mukherjee replaced Moal as the CEO in October 2023.Around the same time, PayU’s then global chief financial officer Akash Moondhra and PayU Finance CEO Prashanth Ranganathan exited the organisation.

Additionally, Bob van Dijk, CEO and board member of Prosus and its parent company Naspers, announced his abrupt departure in September 2023 after a decade-long tenure with the conglomerate. Dijk was replaced by Fabricio Bloisi in March 2024.

Agicha serves on the boards of companies such as BriskPe, DotPe and Fisdom. In April, cross-border payments platform BriskPe had secured $5 million in funding from PayU.

In India, PayU has been focusing on expanding its consumer vertical through the LazyPay mobile application. While merchant payments remain central to its operations, PayU aims to leverage LazyPay to build a comprehensive consumer payments and credit business, Mukherjee said in an interaction with ET on September 2.

Initially launched as an online merchant payments platform, PayU has transitioned into a comprehensive fintech provider in India. Its growth strategy included acquiring Paysense (in 2020), launching LazyPay, and building financial technology solutions via Wibmo, which was acquired in 2019. Key sub-brands LazyPay and Wibmo continue to function independently.

In November, Ervin Tu, president and chief investment officer of Prosus, said the Dutch investor plans to list PayU on the Indian bourses in 2025.

PayU reported an 11% increase in its India revenue, reaching $444 million in fiscal 2024, up from $399 million the previous year.

On April 24, PayU received in-principle approval from the Reserve Bank of India to operate as a payment aggregator (PA), enabling it to start onboarding new merchants.