Ola Launches ‘Ola Credit’, Where Consumers Can Take Ride & Pay Later; Here’s How You Can Get Started

Ola, India’s largest cab-aggregator, launched the Ola Corporate service to make available a wide range of mobility use cases at a much lower costs as against the existing scheduled corporate travel options, along with benefits of a centralized, paperless billing system.

Then the company came up with a postpaid billing service called the Ola Executive so that customers could make a one-time payment to the company at the end of the billing cycles. Now, the company has tweaked this postpaid service to incorporate the cash crunch people are facing these days because of demonetization.

The new product called ‘Ola Credit’ will allow Ola users to pay for their rides later. The delay can be made by almost up to a week, so that for seven days the customer does not face any issues, and can find sufficient time to arrange for cash, if that is the mode of payment.

“‘Ola Credit’ is an important step towards our goal of ensuring mobility for a billion plus Indians. Our deep commitment towards the Indian market, combined with our experience in payment technology helps us to contribute to a digitally enabled India,” said Raghuvesh Sarup, Chief Marketing Officer and Category Head at Ola.

How to Activate this Service?

In the payments option while booking a cab, select the ‘Ola Credit’ payment option. The seven day cycle begins as soon as the first ride is taken on credit. The subsequent rides then get added to it, and the bill will get generated in the next seven days.

Ola says that on the basis of transaction history and user score, the seven day credit could be extended. For example, someone taking an Olacab daily to work could be given 14-21 day credit depending on previous rides and payments.

The Ola Credit service also comes with certain terms and conditions, which makes it seem like the product is a lot like credit cards with shorter billing cycles.

Each user can check Ola Credit limit by navigating to payment options on the Ola App. For corporate users, no rides can be booked, if the user exhausts his / her Ola Credit limit. No rides can be booked, if the Ola Credit usage is not reset to zero within 7 days. The Ola Credit can be used for paying personal and to-be-reimbursed corporate rides only.

Will this Service Kick-Off?

Ola Executive failed to become a major product because daily Ola users are not as many as the company had expected to, and it couldn’t convert them into one either. However, now that the billing period is short and RBI has done a brilliant job of demonetization and taking away notes of higher denominations, it makes sense for people to preserve the precious Rs. 100 notes and contribute to the cashless economy.

Ola hasn’t revealed how it plans to scale operations of this feature in different cities, but it is quite helpful for users to hold their payments for some time before they release it at once. Ola also has a few offers running every now and then on Ola Wallet.

Uber has been staying away from such postpaid services and is doing its job quite well. That ideology of ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ is soon creeping into Olacabs as it launches multiple services at once. The company must also worry about its own cash drying up before launching a new service.