Mumbai, April 1: Flipkart is ramping up its capabilities in mobile payments.

The country's largest e-tailer today announced the acquisition of PhonePe, a mobile payments company for an undisclosed sum.

This is Flipkart's third transaction in mobile payments. In 2014, the company had invested in NGPay. A year later it acquired a majority stake in payment services start-up FX Mart Pvt Ltd, which holds a prepaid wallet licence, for a little over Rs 45 crore.

PhonePe has been founded jointly by Flipkart's two former employees - Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari. It is building the country's first unified payments interface (UPI)-based product. UPI, expected to go live in April, will allow users to transact using their unique identification and mobile phone numbers or virtual payments address without sharing any other bank details.

In a statement, Flipkart said the current payment process involved entering numerous account or card details and multi-level interventions. UPI will provide a highly secure hassle-free digital payments experience. It added that anyone having an active bank account could easily perform instant transactions simply through a mobile phone.

According to Flipkart CEO Binny Bansal, payments have been one of the biggest hurdles for mass adoption of online shopping in India. He said UPI had the potential of transforming the entire payments ecosystem in the country, adding that the acquisition of PhonePe is in line with the company's focus on driving innovation on the payments front.<>Commenting on the transaction, Nigam said PhonePe's mission is to significantly improve the online and offline digital payments experience for millions of Indian customers. "We are really excited to merge with Flipkart and get access to one of the largest consumer bases in the country, which will allow us to realize our vision at a much larger scale," he added.

The PhonePe team will transition to Flipkart but will function as an independent business unit, the Flipkart statement added.

Its not Flipkart alone which is beefing up their presence in the payments space. Last year, Snapdeal announced that it had acquired mobile transaction platform FreeCharge for an undisclosed sum. The transaction was estimated at a little over Rs 2,400 crore. Recent reports say that Amazon has applied for a semi-closed wallet license from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).