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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Problem: Date Formatting cannot be Changed in Microsoft Excel

In this article, we will learn how to change the date formatting. We will use “Text to Column” wizard to resolve the problem of change the date formatting in Microsoft Excel. Let’s understand the functions: - Text to Column:  “Text to Column” is used for separating the cell content which is depending on the way your data is arranged. You can divide the data on the basis of content in the cell such as space, comma, period, semicolon, etc. Let’s take an example and understand how we can convert the date into Text. We have dates, foramatted as text in column A. Now, we want to convert it into date format.     If we want to convert the formatting into numbers, then we need to follow below given steps:- Select the range A2:A11. Go to Data tab, and click on Text to Columns from the Data tools group.     Covert Text to Columns Wizard – Step1 of 3 dialog box will appear. Select fixed width, and click on Next button.     Skip step-2, and...
Post a Comment
Read more
How To Remove Gphone Virus Well gphone.exe is nowadays one of the most dangerous virus spreading very rapidly. It is a Trojan and changes your IE homepage and sends tries to open gtalk and yahoo messenger. It even sends messages to gtalk contacts. Its icon is just like that of folder icon and people thinking of folder click on it get infected by the virus. Gphone virus basically is a 260 kb .exe file which looks like a folder and it can take any name of any other folder if you have clicked on the virus folder which looks like a folder but it is not. If you have a folder name ―movies‖ in your D drive it will make a exe file in the folder named movies.exe and if you click on that exe file it too work as a virus. It makes .exe files in all the folders you have with the name of the folder. How to remove this virus Method 1 1. Go to Task Manager then Processes and then click on gphone.exe and click on end process. 2. Manually go to folder where gphone.exe is present and delete it. 3...
Post a Comment
Read more