It’s getting crowded in Digital wallet space, with every other company launching their own Digital wallet. In recent times, there has been not a single month when we have not heard about some or the other digital wallet getting launched.
Flipkart, the homegrown ECommerce giant, last week announced launch of their own digital wallet, and now Amazon India has announced their intentions to launch it as well.
According to the reports, Amazon India is planning to come out with their own Digital Wallet and they will most probably take the acquisition path to achieve it. Amazon recently acquired Emvantage, a Noida-based payments services provider making this its first acquisition in India. Now, they are looking to do multiple acquisitions in online payments space specifically for the purpose of launching own Digital Wallet.
Amazon India had recently hired Sriraman Jagannathan, an ex-Citibank guy, who is most likely to spearhead their Digital wallet initiative. Sriraman had played a key role in the launch of Airtel Money, Bharti Airtel’s Digital wallet. So, in him, Amazon have a person who has the experience to achieve the goal!
It is expected that Amazon India will launch their own Digital wallet in about 3-4 months time. Amazon declined to comment on this topic and only said that they are exploring acquisitions at this point of time.
In an emailed statement to ToI, Srinivas Rao, director at Amazon Payments India said, “Payments are key to the e-commerce ecosystem. Developing a trusted, frictionless and ubiquitous payments ecosystem is critical to our customer-centric philosophy and we will invest in building the capabilities to drive our strategy.”
Why Own Digital Wallets?
Digital Wallets are playing a key role in ECommerce space in India, which is now seeing a 4 way fight between Flipkart, Snapdeal, Paytm and Amazon themselves. Except Amazon, all the other players already have a Digital wallet in place, and one of them (Paytm) being the leader in this space.
Digital Wallets help ECommerce companies to restrict customer’s payment data within their own ecosystem without the need of sharing it with third party payment providers. This data helps them to gather customer insights and their spending habits which can be of immense value to Ecommerce firms.
That’s precisely the reason why Snapdeal acquired Freecharge for whopping $450 million in April of last year. With Flipkart too announcing their own wallet last week, it was imperative for Amazon to have their own wallet as well!
