Bengaluru, Feb 28 (IANS): Payments and banking technology firm Cashfree on Tuesday announced its strategic acquisition of Zecpe, a one-click checkout company, to enhance its Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) checkout capabilities, giving its merchants elevated end-to-end checkout and payment experience.

This acquisition will also enable Cashfree Payments to offer additional value-added services like Return to Origin (RTO) reduction, fraud detection, and address pre-filling, among others.

"We are certain that this acquisition will strengthen our D2C one-click checkout capabilities and further elevate our leadership position in the SMB space. At Cashfree Payments, we are focused on offering the widest range of payments solutions and thereby constantly evolving our product suite to cater to the changing needs of our merchants," Akash Sinha, CEO and Co-Founder, Cashfree Payments, said in a statement.

Zecpe Founder Hriday Agarwal will join Cashfree Payments as Head of e-commerce -- Checkout, also the employees of Zecpe will join the company along with him to help scale the product further.

"We see a natural fitment with Cashfree Payments' payments stack. We believe that integrating Zecpe's solution with the company's offerings will enable end-to-end checkout and payment solutions to clients. The products that we have developed will benefit from the scale that Cashfree Payments has built over the years," Agarwal said in a statement.

Zecpe will now operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cashfree Payments.

The solution provided by Zecpe is in line with Cashfree Payments' product strategy, which focuses on the benefits to end customers of their merchants.

Cashfree Payments previously acquired Telr, a leading Payment Service Provider in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as part of its MENA (a group of countries located in and around the Middle East and North Africa) region expansion strategy.