Taking the competition in the payment wallet space head on, FreeCharge is all set to enter the payment acceptance segment in the month of April.
“Yes! From April onwards FreeCharge wallet will not only pay your bills, but will also help you accept money from others. We plan to launch new technology that will enable frictionless payments for both customers and merchants,” FreeCharge Chief Operating Officer Govind Rajan told Deccan Herald.
FreeCharge plans to expand its platform to bring on board all players for payments, and will use IPL as a platform to roll out its new services.
“We want our payment platform to be opened for everybody, even to self-help groups. April onwards, it will be applicable for more use cases,” he said. Rajan said the company would like to work with merchants, to enable both online and offline transaction.
FreeCharge has tied up with Ezetap, Pine Labs, ePaisa and retail Point of Sales (PoS) so that it can be in the sweet shop, kirana shop, travel service office, among others.
“In the online world, we are looking at all use cases. We started off with mobile recharges first. Then brought mobile payments and all other bill payments. We have brought in metro and other areas. Finally, we want to be the one-stop shop for all payment activities of consumers... Since we have virtual cards, we can get into various government payment segment, then into dining, travel, commuting, and entertainment... We won’t be a payment bank. It is the responsibility of the banks to manage the customers’ funds. We would like to focus on the seamless integration of technology for payment. We want to differentiate ourverslves in the payment segement,” said Rajan.
He said the company has one million active transactions per day. “By the end of this year, we will reach 7 to 7.5 million transactions. Half of this should happen in offline world,” he said.
Commenting on the customer trust, he said it comes once there are more users and how sophistication and simplicity on your product is. “Here you have to address the pain points of customer. Since their trust is highly demanding we have to raise the bar to be a company to evolve themselves. So we will have to do multiple things via focus,” he said.
“We are focussed on market development. Our priority here is to focus on B2C issues. Once we find traction in this segment only we will look at other segment. We want to move consumers from cash payment to digital payments by relieving pain points the payment system. So that is our only focus right now,” he said.