NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, September 17, 2015

When ecommerce marketplace Snapdeal acquired mobile top-up site FreeCharge in April – the biggest acquisition in India to date – the promise was to build a digital commerce ecosystem. An important piece of that jigsaw fell into place today with the launch of a new mobile wallet by Snapdeal and FreeCharge jointly.

FreeCharge has been doing hundreds of thousands of mobile top-up transactions a day, mostly with credit or debit cards. Snapdeal also has tens of millions of mobile buyers active on its app. Between them, they have 87 million registered users, who will get app upgrades to be able to use the new wallet without any need for additional downloads. With 8.2 million daily unique users, 4 million monthly engaged hours, and 15 million stored cards – combined with a GMV (gross merchandize value) of over US$4 billion – Snapdeal and FreeCharge hope theirs will become the most used wallet in India.

At the launch event in Bangalore today, Snapdeal’s chief product officer, Anand Chandrasekaran, said this was the toughest product they had built so far. “Getting 87 million people to upgrade to a single account is no child’s play,” he pointed out.

Challenging Paytm

The wallet is being rolled out in partnership with Fino, one of the 11 companies to get payments banking licences from the Reserve Bank of India. It will be a challenge to Paytm, a leader in this space which has the backing of Alibaba’s Ant Financial and claims to have 25 million active wallets.