Flipkart, the homegrown e-commerce giant, recently announced the launch of their own digital wallet, and now Amazon India has announced their intentions to launch its own digital wallet.
According to the reports, Amazon India is planning to come out with their own digital wallet and they will most probably achieve it through acquisition. Amazon recently made their first acquisition in India by acquiring Emvantage, a Noida-based payments services provider. 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.
Srinivas Rao, Director at Amazon Payments India, said, “Payments are key to the e-commerce ecosystem. Developing a trusted, smooth and ubiquitous payments ecosystem is critical to our customer-centric philosophy and we will invest in building the capabilities to drive our strategy.”
Digital wallets are playing a key role in e-commerce 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 e-commerce 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 e-commerce firms.
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