Following its growth during demonetisation, Mobikwik has now decided to expand its presence geographically as well. The digital payments platform has today announced that it is now setting up another office in Pune. This office will house over 250 employees across divisions of business development and sales. All team members will be hired by the end of March 2017.
The company states that Pune has one of the largest contributors towards the success of their business and it’s only fair to set up base there. Mobikwik has recently bagged a massive $40 million strategic investment from South Africa-based mobile payment solution provider Net1. The said investment is being utilized to expand its own reach as well as its products. Commenting on this expansion plan, Upasana Taku, co-founder, MobiKwik, says,
Pune has been the second largest contributor to our business from Maharashtra and has been an integral part of our growth strategy.
Further, she goes on to add that Mobikwik is now looking to achieve a whopping 400 percent increase in business growth in 2017 once this second office becomes operational. It has also earmarked some major milestones the company has achieved since it became operational in Pune.
Mobikwik’s cashless payments app is now supported at all major petrol stations in Pune. The company has also partnered with Pune-based NGO Samagra to launch a savings platform M-Gullak. This initiative not only enables the poor population to save money as little as Rs 2 but also gain access to the digital payments infrastructure.
As for how this works, Samagra representatives collect the desired savings amount from poor individuals and deposit them in Mobikwik accounts. This indirectly enables the said section of the population to get connected to a digital platform and transfer funds accordingly. This allows them to seamlessly transfer funds to friends or family, to bank accounts, pay utility bills or recharge their phones. It will make the process easier one tap at a time.
This, Taku believes, is an ideal location for the company’s expansion as Pune has been very accepting towards digitisation. Talking about the same, she says,
Being an IT hub and home to many prestigious educational institutions, Pune has many early adopters of digitization that makes it the right fit for our growth strategy. Our endevour is to convert all major use cases in the city to digital and promote adoption of MobiKwik to accelerate growth.
Also, the company has constantly been focusing its efforts on the improvement of its digital payments platform. It has recently introduced a lightweight version of its Android app, which operates even on sluggish networks (a common issue in India, being tackled by Jio). Mobikwik also extended the scope of multilingual support on its platform, and now offers support for as many as eight languages.
