Amazon India, the e-commerce giant is looking to ramp up its payments business in the Indian market. For this, the company plans to sign up government institutions such as electricity boards and insurance companies to create use cases for Amazon Pay outside its online marketplace.
Expanding its presence beyond its own marketplace, the company has launched payments on online food delivery players like Faasos and Box8 besides home services application Housejoy.
The business expansion comes after the company got a prepaid instrument (PPI), or a wallet licence from banking regulator Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last month. Currently, it is in talks with state electricity boards and public insurance companies as well, to get them on-board for payment solutions.
In an email response to ET, Amazon spokersperson said:
We are always testing ways to improve experience for our customers and these experiments are part of that.
The company did not provide specifics on other players it plans to sign on to grow the wallet. Earlier, it was reported that Amazon Pay is also trying to expand offline and currently works with a few such outlets including Crocs and Cafe Coffee Day.
With Amazon entering the Indian online payments space, it will be competing against other companies in the space such as China’s Alipay-backed digital payments player Paytm, who is the market leader besides Flipkart’s PhonePe and MobiKwik.
In India, Amazon Pay is planning to build a full-stack payment play. Tie-ups are aimed at increasing the use case, ubiquity and stickiness. For e.g., the customers who have saved their credit or debit cards on Amazon, will now be able to use that to pay on third-party players that Amazon India ties up with besides using the wallet.
The wallet is directed at frequently transacting users and those from the tier-II locations and those on low-bandwidth networks to reduce friction in payments. Amazon has invested in point-of-sale machines and technology infrastructure for accepting digital payments on delivery and enabling one-click transactions.
Amazon Pay, which is housed under Amazon Online Distribution, has recently received an infusion of ₹67 crore from its parent company. Sriram Jagganathan, the Vice President of payments at Amazon India said that the raised capital will be used to ramp up merchant acquisition as well as create use-cases around small-ticket transactions through the instrument.
