Prosus sells PayU

On Tuesday, Prosus announced plans to sell parts of its fintech company PayU to UK-based Rapyd for a cool $610 million. The deal excludes PayU's operations in India, as well as its units in Turkey and Indonesia. It does include PayU's Global Payments Organisation, which operates in over 30 countries and makes up about a third of PayU's overall revenue. That unit has seen payment volumes grow like crazy, up over 300% in the past five years alone.

PayU is a major player in the digital payments world, serving over 450,000 merchants and millions of consumers across 50 markets. The honchos at Prosus are pushing it to double down in areas where it has a substantial market share, and offload the rest. PayU is the leading payments service provider in India and is rapidly expanding its credit offering.

Prosus CEO Bob van Dijk is under pressure to unlock value in the portfolio at a scale comparable to the epic bet on Tencent. The payments and fintech segment is most promising, and showed revenue growth of 52% in the last financial year. It's encouraging to see that all bets are on the table.