Pine Labs acquires Saluto Wellness to bolster its rewards management play

According to sources, the deal is a full cash buyout and senior management of Saluto will get equity shares of Pine Labs. The deal is pegged at Rs 40-50 crore, people aware of the discussions told ET.

The acquisition will allow Pine Labs to provide corporate enterprises and brand partners with reward workflow management capabilities for their customers, supply chain vendors and channel partners.

It will also give Pine Labs ready access to Saluto’s enterprise customers as it looks to cross-sell digital payments and other capabilities.

Over the past year Pine Labs has been on an aggressive acquisition spree, picking up application programming interface (API)-based infrastructure company Setu; payments solution provider for small enterprises Mosambee; and Mumbai-based online payments startup Qfix in 2022.

The acquisitions are aimed at helping Pine Labs diversify its revenue across software and value-added services, apart from its legacy payment and point-of-sale (PoS) offerings to offline stores.

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“Most of our acquisitions including Mosambee, Qfix and Setu last year have a clear rationale. The acquisition of Saluto is on the (rewards) workflow management side where corporates and small enterprises get a B2B solution to manage their rewards and incentives. It allows us to now target the rewards ecosystem as one company and solution,” said Amrish Rau, chief executive officer, Pine Labs. According to Rau, Saluto will retain its brand but operate under the Qwikcilver umbrella. Qwikcilver, which was acquired by Pine Labs in March 2019, allows large enterprises and brands to issue prepaid gift cards and reward solutions.

While Qwikcilver works on the new reward issuances, Saluto will bolster workflow management for these rewards.

In September 2022, Pine Labs announced the completion of its merger with Qwikcilver, leading to its consolidation into a single legal entity — Pine Labs Private Limited.

Through these acquisitions, software revenues excluding payment terminal services now account for roughly 30% of Pine Labs’ overall revenue, Rau said.

“With Saluto’s platform, we expect to further enhance our leadership across enterprise rewards, recognition, incentive and engagement programmes. Their solution, integrated with our offerings, will help us deliver more programmes to our existing enterprise clients, resulting in larger and more long-term engagements,” said Kumar Sudarsan, president, issuing business, Pine Labs.

Incorporated in 2017, Saluto Wellness provides an integrated platform for employee and wellness engagement programs. It also provides management solutions for customer loyalty and channel incentives to businesses.

As a part of the deal, the entire team of Saluto will join Pine Labs.

“Our enterprise solutions are today being used across diverse industry verticals and we are excited to become part of a fast-growing, progressive fintech like Pine Labs and together scale our business further,” said K Siva Kumar, cofounder and CEO of Saluto Wellness.

Earlier this month, Pine Labs forayed into the United Arab Emirates (UAE) through partnerships with local banks and financial institutions. It already has a strong presence across India and Southeast Asian markets including Malaysia and Singapore.