With a view to broaden its existing basket of offerings, digital payments facilitator Freecharge is said to be mulling its plans to foray into lending and insurance space.
Under the ambitious plans to be rolled out in the next four months, multiple financial services would be made available on its application including facilitating services such as opening of customers’ bank accounts.
The move that is aimed at bringing newer customers especially existing, non-Axis bank customers into its fold, would now place wholly owned subsidiary of private sector lender Axis bank in direct competition with other Fintech players such as Paytm that already boost of many such products and services. To actualise this, Freecharge is said to have also increased its workforce strength by 30 per cent to presently around 256 people.
As of now, witnessing a booming phase, Indian mobile wallet and payments space consists of as Flipkart promoted PhonePe and Mobikwik which for now, have not indicated any plans to foray into financial services in near future.
Akin to its rival Paytm, the Gurgaon-based Mobile Wallet player is said to be banking majorly on industry initiatives like BharatQR and UPI to help it tap customers in tier-2 and tier-3 Indian cities and also help it in securing offline merchants.
Going by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data in March this year, digital transaction in India has seen an upsurge in FY18 with a staggering 2X volume than the previous fiscal year. About 20,540 million transactions took place in FY18 as compared to 10,000 million to the preceding fiscal.
