Oxigen Wallet aims to add another15-20 million customers in the next 12 months, its Chief Executive Officer Ankur Saxena said. This will be nearly double the current customer base of about 25 million.

Oxigen Wallet, which was relaunched in 2014 and has mostly stayed away from the heavy discounting and freebies model to attract customers, is hopeful of becoming profitable by end-March 2018, according to Saxena.

This time-line relates to the wallet division of Oxigen Online services. In the coming months, Oxigen Online service is also looking to launch, through a joint venture route, a marketplace for consumption of financial services. Saxena said that the joint venture partner will be a foreign player, but declined to divulge its name.

Virtual Visa card On virtual Visa card, a pre-paid card that went live under Oxigen wallet in January this year, Saxena said that the company was looking to bring more flexibility into this facility.

“Very soon, one will be able to reload money into this virtual Visa card. Currently, there is no facility to reload the card once it has been generated. We are creating flexibility. You want to use it as disposable card you can do. You want to use it as a multi re-loadable card you can do that as well,” he said.

With virtual Visa card, a wallet user can create a one-time 16-digit card number before making any transaction. This creates an added layer of security to transactions.

As on date, there are five lakh active virtual Visa cards and the total value loaded in these cards till date is ₹10 crore.

Saxena also said Oxigen Wallet will go live with m-Visa next month and plans to acquire about 45,000 retail outlets with m-Visa acceptance capability.

Long-term strategy Saxena said that last year the game (in the electronic wallet space) was about number of subscribers. This year the game is transactions and next year the game is going to be about profitability. “In our view, it is not the best strategy to give freebies/discounts to acquire customers.”

India is a long-term game and this is not a winner-takes-it-all kind of country, he added.

“Since it is a long-term strategy in India, we want to ensure that we are there and connected with real paying customers and only try and service those customers that really have a specific need to be fulfilled,” Saxena said.

One of the reasons why Oxigen wallets are a hit among customers is the facility that allows offline retail stores, which are part of Oxigen network, to load cash into Oxigen wallet.

There is also the facility of allowing money to be moved from the wallet to a bank account.

Saxena also admitted that the e-wallet space is overcrowded and there are already some talks of consolidation in this space.

Correction

The news report has been modified to correct the value of money loaded in virtual Visa cards till date to ₹10 crore, from ₹1 crore.

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