Pine Labs to Launch Stablecoin Payments Abroad
Indian fintech major Pine Labs is launching a stablecoin-backed prepaid card in nine countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. This marks a significant move by an Indian payments company to use stablecoin rails at scale. The launch notably excludes India, likely due to local regulatory uncertainty, showcasing a trend of Indian firms building global products to leapfrog domestic constraints.
The upcoming stablecoin-backed prepaid card is a significant international push for Pine Labs, a company that began its journey in 1998 by providing card-based payment and loyalty solutions specifically for the Indian petroleum sector. Founded by IIT alumni Lokvir Kapoor, Rajul Garg, and Tarun Upadhyay, the initial focus was on addressing the payment needs of oil companies. This early work culminated recently in securing major multi-year contracts with India's top three oil companies—BPCL, HPCL, and IOCL—to deploy and manage their nationwide digital payments infrastructure. The firm's trajectory wasn't linear. A pivotal moment came in the early 2000s when two co-founders departed, leaving Lokvir Kapoor to steer the company. Recognizing a broader market need beyond fuel retail, Kapoor, an IIT Kanpur and IIM Bangalore alumnus, pivoted the company to focus on the mainstream Point-of-Sale (POS) systems, targeting a gap between what merchants needed and what banks were offering. This stablecoin initiative will be funded from users' digital wallets and allow for real-time conversion into local currencies at the point of sale. The project is slated to go live by the end of April 2026 in nine countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia, specifically targeting markets with a "stablecoin-friendly stance." This move deliberately bypasses the Indian market, where the regulatory landscape for digital assets remains uncertain, though not outright prohibitive. The company's current CEO, Amrish Rau, previously co-founded the fintech startup Citrus Pay, which was acquired by PayU in 2016. His leadership has seen Pine Labs evolve from a hardware-centric POS provider into a multifaceted merchant commerce platform, a transition that included key acquisitions like gift card provider Qwikcilver and Southeast Asian consumer fintech platform Fave. This expansion into stablecoin payments places Pine Labs in a competitive field with other global payment giants. PayPal has rolled out its own stablecoin, PYUSD, while Stripe has been actively building out its crypto infrastructure, including acquiring the stablecoin platform Bridge. Pine Labs is also making significant investments in AI, recently announcing a collaboration with OpenAI to build "Agentic Commerce." The goal is to embed reasoning capabilities into its core stack, moving beyond simple transaction processing to autonomously optimizing merchant workflows and creating a more intelligent and adaptive commerce infrastructure. This initiative aims to leverage India's massive digital payments market to scale advanced AI applications in fintech.
