MOBILE WALLETS ATTRACTIVE OFFERS

With serpentine queues outside ATMs continuing to hassle cash-strapped public, mobile wallet companies are rolling out offers to woo customers to move to their digital payment platforms. MobiKwik has announced that its users will be able to transfer money instantly to any bank account at zero per cent fee. The move, Mobikwik believes, will encourage retailers, shopkeepers and users to use mobile wallet and overcome the challenges that they are facing in procuring and using cash. "We support Indian government's bold currency reform, that is a long-term move to eliminate black money and corruption in India. However, masses are facing issues in procuring and transacting in cash. To help them overcome this challenge, we have announced zero per cent fee on bank transfers," Mobikwik co-founder Bipin Preet Singh said. Earlier, transferring money from a mobile wallet to the bank would see a levy of 4 per cent fee for a non-KYC user and one per cent for a KYC user. Mobikwik said it has registered 18-fold growth in transactions since the announcement of demonetisation that saw old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes ceasing to be legal tender. Users can load money into their m-wallets using their credit/debit cards or netbanking. Digital payment platforms have seen a huge surge in transactions as well as downloads in the last few days. Paytm, a mobile payments and commerce platform, today said it has touched a record number of payment transactions at 5 million and is on the way to process over Rs 24,000 crore. This is higher than any other payment network in the country, it claimed. Paytm said it has registered 700 per cent increase in overall traffic and 1,000 per cent growth in the amount of money added to the Paytm account over the last couple of days. "During this period, the transaction value continued to be 200 per cent of the average ticket size while the number of app downloads went up 300 per cent. The number of transactions per user also went up from 3 transactions to over 18 transactions in a week," it said. The mobile payment transaction volume is likely to register a compounded growth rate of over 90 per cent to reach 153 billion by FY22 as against a meagre 3 billion transactions in FY16, according to an ASSOCHAM-RNCOS joint study. Mobile payment transaction value in India is also likely to register over 150 per cent CAGR and cross Rs 2,000 trillion by FY22 from just over Rs 8 trillion as of FY16, the study titled Indian M-wallet market said.