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Bharti Airtel has roped in IT major Infosys to power its mobile wallet services. Under this partnership, Airtel will deploy Infosys' WalletEdge technology to support cashless payments.
The mobile commerce offering serves as an alternative to cash/ card payments online, after the user loads cash on to his account. The account can be recharged either through retail outlets- similar to recharging a prepaid account, or using net banking facilities from the user's bank account.
Once the cash is loaded in the account, Airtel customers can pay bills, recharge accounts, shop at over 7,000 merchant outlets, transact online through multiple channels including mobile phones, Interactive Voice Response, ATMs and Point of Sale.
The Airtel Money service is currently available in over 300 cities across India. “This will be our USP going forward as it helps in financial inclusion,” Mr Rohit Malhotra, CEO, Karnataka Bharti Airtel, told Business Line after the launch of the service in Karnataka. He added that with increased mobile phone penetration in rural areas, this could be a good market for the service.
INFOSYS PLATFORM
The Infosys platform is a scalable platform capable of supporting millions of transactions annually in a secure environment. Delivered through a private cloud, it creates a shared services framework that allows members of the ecosystem to process payment instructions seamlessly and cost efficiently.
Mr V. Balakrishnan Member of the Board, Infosys, said, “The game-changing mobile commerce platform will also unleash new market opportunities for Bharti Airtel in the digital commerce space.”
Mobile payment services are slowly but surely gaining currency in the Indian market, going by the spate of announcements in the last few days by global payment companies, banks, telecom vendors and mobile financial solution providers. All of them are keen to grab a slice of the Indian mobile payments market, which is seen as the next bastion of growth.
Global payments company MasterCard announced the launch of its open-loop Worldwide Mobile Money Partnership programme, in partnership with Comviva, a mobile financial solution provider. The partnership aims to help financially under-served consumers globally access mainstream financial services as also make purchases, transfer funds and pay bills via their mobile phones.
HDFC Bank and Movida had also launched a mobile payment service that allows customers to make payments through their mobile phones.
The trigger for these launches is the fact that there are more mobile phones in use in India than the number of bank accounts. Mr Sanjay Kapoor, CEO-India and South Asia, Bharti Airtel, said that national rollout of Airtel Money would accelerate mobile-based commerce in India. While an estimated 240 million people across India hold bank accounts, more than 90 per cent of country's population uses cash to pay for its daily needs.
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