Skip to main content

Amazon gets licence to launch digital wallet

After homegrown e-tailers Flipkart and Snapdeal, the Indian arm of the world’s biggest e-commerce company Amazon.com, Inc. will have its own digital wallet. The company has secured a licence from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate a prepaid payment instrument (PPI), becoming the latest entrant into the country’s booming financial technology space.
According to the RBI website, Amazon Online Distribution Services Pvt. Ltd secured the licence late last month.
“RBI is in the process of finalising the guidelines for PPIs. We look forward to seeing a continuation of low-limit wallet dispensation with simplified KYC and authentication. This will allow us to help customers adopt digital payments at scale,” Sriram Jagannathan, vice president, payments, Amazon India, said in response to a query from VCCircle.
A former Citibank executive, Jagannathan joined Amazon India in February 2016 to head its payments business.
In December, the company had launched Amazon Pay Balance, a payment option similar to mobile wallets, except it was restricted to transactions on Amazon. The new wallet licence is expected to be linked to Amazon Pay.
“We recently launched Amazon Pay where customers can fund their pre-paid balance using internet banking and credit/debit card for smooth purchases and payments. We will continue to improve customer experience and increasing digital payments leveraging our PPI licence,” Jagannathan added.
However, the company did not disclose whether, after securing a full-fledged wallet licence, it will open Amazon Pay to other platforms as well.
Payments focus
Apart from Amazon Pay, Amazon India used e-gift cards for transactions on its online marketplace. The gift cards were powered by Bangalore-based startup QwikCilver Solutions, in which Amazon picked up a minority stake in 2014. However, QwikCilver also happens to have its own PPI licence. Amazon has merged its e-gift cards into Amazon Pay.
Besides, in February, it bought Noida-based payment gateway firm Emvantage, marking its first acquisition in India.
Amazon’s rising focus on digital payments can be gauged from recent developments at the firm. The authorised share capital of Amazon Online Distribution Services has risen from Rs 69 crore to Rs 400 crore, The Economic Times reported in January quoting a Registrar of Companies (RoC) filing.
But is this likely to yield stellar results?
Sanjay Khan Nagra, senior associate at law firm Khaitan & Co, feels no one has been able to leverage their PPI licence or acquisition [of wallets] like, say, Paytm. He thinks if Amazon is looking to use its wallet like Flipkart and Snapdeal, there is little value. “But if Amazon does some tie-ups around its wallet’s acceptance and discounts for consumers, it could bring results. Acceptability of the wallet is important,” he says.
However, Sanjay Swamy, managing partner at fintech-focussed fund Prime Venture Partners, believes Amazon will be using its wallet licence to make customer experience delightful.
“With wallet, the first thing would be to look at refunds. The wallet will give Amazon the ability to give instant refunds to customers. Second, the checkout process will be simplified with two-factor authentication, one-time password etc. for customers who frequently shop on Amazon. The third possibility is making itself a payment instrument,” Swamy says.
He, however, feels that Amazon’s near-term focus would be to make consumers’ life more convenient on its own site, and it might look at other platforms later.
E-commerce add-on?
Most frontline e-commerce players in the country are looking to have their own digital wallets to achieve scale and have control over the most important aspect of the online shopping funnel, that is, payments.
Flipkart has its own digital wallet, the UPI-enabled PhonePe which it acquired in April 2016 to strengthen its payments business. Today, the platform claims to have crossed 10 million downloads on Google Play. The Yes Bank-powered digital payments app claims to be doing over a lakh transactions every day.
The beleaguered Snapdeal was India’s first e-commerce company to bet on digital payments. It shelled out nearly $400 million to buy mobile wallet FreeCharge to push up transaction volumes for Snapdeal as a group. Today, FreeCharge stands a distant third in the pecking order with market leader Paytm topping the charts.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Best Web Hosting Services

Are you looking for the best web  hosting  services for your needs? Whether you need a place to host your small personal blog or a major corporate website, the following list will help you identify the best hosts to use. Finding the best web hosting service isn’t quite as straightforward as searching Google and choosing the one with the lowest price. There are a lot of issues to consider, including the reasons for  why  you need hosting and  how  you intend to use it. Once you have a handle on that, finding the right host becomes much easier. Choose one that’s undersized and you’ll end up with website outages and slow page loads, but choose one that’s oversized and you’ll be throwing money away. Defining Your Web Hosting Needs Before choosing your web host, you’ll need to think about your requirements. Consider the following concerns and decide the importance of each item on a scale of 0 to 10 (with 0 being not at all...
Post a Comment
Read more

Now You Can Use Reliance Jio 4G Services On 2G And 3G Smartphones

Indians will always be at the top in availing any free internet facility. As, Reliance Jio aims to offer free 4G internet to the 90% of Indians, hence, with one of its services now you can use Jio 4G services on 2G and 3G smartphones. Now You Can Use Reliance Jio 4G Services On 2G And 3G Smartphones Who doesn’t want the free internet? Of course, we all want, Indians will always be at the top in availing any free internet facility. Jio, which is also known as Reliance Jio and officially as Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited has already given its users free unlimited 4G data for 90 days. As the Reliance Jio aims to offer free 4G internet to the 90% of Indians along with the free voice calls and messaging services. So, we all must agree that Indians are always at the peak when it comes about available any internet facility. We all know Jio, which is also known as Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited has previously given its users free unlimited 4G data for 90 days. Not only that but even th...
Post a Comment
Read more

10 Essential Tips To Keep In Mind While Surfing The Internet

BENGALURU: Internet is an amazing resource which is stapled in many people’s day-to-day lives. It is very much informative but at the same time encircled with many dangers. Listed below are the strategies you can follow to stay safe on the internet as stated by Tech Radar India. Use your discretion on social media Online scams crops up almost everywhere in webpage such as an e-mail, tweet, Facebook post, or many other places. Never click on links that do not look like a real address or pop-ups that claim you have won millions of dollars—all these are scams in which one can easily get trapped. Also don’t fall prey to e-mails which ask you to help someone transfer a large amount of money out of their country delineating their long sad story. Hackers can access data through various innovative ways like sharing links of content that they feel the targeted person is likely to click. Be careful of what you are sharing Limit the content that you share on social media. Facebook...
Post a Comment
Read more