FreeCharge Digital Wallet to make ATMs passé

By Nandita Singh

BENGALURU: Digital platform for recharge and utility payments, FreeCharge today announced the launch of FreeCharge Digital Wallet in partnership with YES bank, one of India’s leading private sector banks and FINO - a recent payments bank licensee in India.

The digital wallet service will transform mobile and web transactions by facilitating easy and secure payments.

With an ecosystem of Snapdeal and FreeCharge combine totaling to 8.2 million daily unique users, 4 million monthly engaged hours, 15 million stored cards, and transactions clocking $4 billion in GMV (gross merchnadize value), FreeCharge Digital Wallet aims to scale and become India’s most used wallet in the next six months.

“Currently, Snapdeal and FreeCharge both put together have 87 million registered users, who average at 2,298 transactions per second at peak transaction point,” said Kunal Shah, CEO and co-founder at FreeCharge.

The digital wallet is focused on enabling a culture of digital payments through multiple partnerships and is raring to make ATMs passe. “With the launch of the FreeCharge Digital Wallet, we are all set to transform the way people make payments. It is a truly game-changing service,” said Kunal Shah of FreeCharge.

FreeCharge Digital Wallet is powered by cutting edge technology, consumer behaviour insights and innovations in payments, according to Anand Chandrasekaran, Chief Product Officer at Snapdeal. The wallet leverages enabling technologies such as HCE, NFC, QR code and BLE to bring in efficiencies in the consumers’ purchase experience. It takes anywhere between 10-12 seconds to complete a transaction with FreeCharge and the app is quite light at 13 MB when running. Besides, there is no additional charge usually termed as ‘transfer to bank fees’ which users pay while executing any online transactions. In the price sensitive India market this will likely be a clincher in speeding the wallet adoption.

FreeCharge was founded in 2010 by Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon and had received funding of over $120 million in the last four years. The firm had 27 million registered users at the time Snapdeal acquired FreeCharge in April of 2015 resulting in an integrated m-commerce ecosystem. Snapdeal founded in 2010 by Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, has 200,000 registered sellers, as on date.

“At Snapdeal we are building an ecosystem that powers billions of digital commerce transactions. With the launch of the FreeCharge Digital Wallet, we will now play an even more intrinsic role in our customers’ lives,” said Kunal Bahl, CEO and Co-Founder, Snapdeal commenting on the launch.

With this wallet service in its kitty, Snapdeal is ready for the big bang this festive season with Rs1,000 crore cashback plan in coupon promotions in the offing.