Ola is entering the payments segment. In a fresh announcement today, India’s largest cab-hailing service has announced a tie up with Oyo Rooms, Saavn and a few other third-party services to let users pay via Ola Money, its mobile wallet service which is currently integrated into Ola Cabs and Ola Cafe.
This move will allow Ola users “who already maintain a significant balance in their Ola Money” accounts, to pay conveniently on a wide range of leading e-commerce platforms.
With this announcement, Ola is also divulging a few numbers regarding the usage of its wallet service. Ola says, that Ola money currently has a massive 20 Million userbase, putting it one among the top 3 mobile wallets in the country by transaction volume. Ola also mentions, that average balance in Ola Money goes up to as high as ₹1,000, which easily puts it well above other industry standards.
According to its latest third-party partnerships, customers can use the balance saved in their mobile wallet to shop for a variety of products and services across leading merchants like Oyo Rooms and a select other partners. More merchants like Lenskart and Saavn will be active soon.
Rushil Goel, who heads Ola Money, said in a prepared statement,
We are excited to introduce Ola Money in its new avatar to our users and welcome leading merchants who want to benefit from this solution.
By taking this experience to more merchants, we are enabling our users to do more with Ola Money and helping merchants gain access to one of the most convenient payment experiences we know of today.
While Ola Money users will obviously get to pay more conveniently on Ola’s third-party tie-ups, they will also stand to benefit from promotions in the form of cashbacks and discounts from merchants in the initial phase of rollout.
As for competition, Ola money will face tough opponents in PayTM and Mobikwik. PayTM is perhaps in a different league I would say, considering that it now has a payments banking license, allowing it to diversify its payment solution to zillion other fields.
