A few months ago, when the e-commerce major Snapdeal acquired Bengaluru-based FreeCharge, which is one of the leading digital platforms for recharge and utility payments in India, it was said to be one of the largest acquisition in the consumer internet space in the country.
Four months post the acquisition in April 2015, FreeCharge has launched its digital wallet service and intends to make it the most used wallet in the country. The technical team at FreeCharge developed this digital wallet in four months' time.
The company claims that an ecosystem of 8.2 million daily unique users, four million monthly engaged hours, 15 million stored cards, combined with gross merchandise volume (GMV) of over US $ 4 billion, will help it achieve the goal of being the most used wallet smoothly. It has also partnered with FINO - a payments bank licensee to build scale and ability to reach the under-served in the rural and remote areas of the country.
The company representatives, during its launch in Bengaluru on Tuesday, gave a live demonstration to show the wallet's capability to finish a transaction within 12 seconds. The digital wallet, which is based on high end technology, consumer behaviour insights and innovations in payments, aims to make the consumers’ purchase experience better.
“With the launch of the FreeCharge Digital Wallet, we are all set to transform the way people make payments. Our aim is to offer them a secure, easy to use and feature-rich service. The app size is only 13 MB.” Kunal Shah, CEO and co-founder, FreeCharge, said during its launch in Bengaluru.
Kunal Bahl, CEO and co-founder, Snapdeal, who too was present during the launch, said his company aims to bring in efficiency in payments, using digital commerce, so as to cater to every consumption need that a user may have. “Consumer needs are constantly evolving and we feel it is the right time to launch a trusted and feature-rich digital wallet service. At Snapdeal, we are building an ecosystem that powers billions of digital commerce transactions,” he added.
Interestingly, FreeCharge as a platform, has 27 million registered users, making more than five transactions per month per user and has over 90 per cent of transactions originating from mobile phones. This digital platform for recharge and utility payments provides prepaid, post-paid, DTH and electricity bill payment for almost all Indian service providers.
