Freecharge ties up with a homegrown OS to take on rival Paytm

Freecharge is rolling up its sleeves to take on rival Paytm.

The Snapdeal-backed digital wallet company has tied up with India’s first native-language operating system for phones, Indus OS, which is now second to Android.

The partnership will give Freecharge access to over five million non-English-speaking Indus users.

“The English-speaking user base is in the minority in India. This is definitely useful in getting ahead of competition like Paytm,” Freecharge CEO Govind Rajan told Tech in Asia.

The OS is adding close to half a million new users each month.

In November 2015, Freecharge said it had acquired 10 million registered active users for its wallet service within 60 days of becoming available to customers. The startup did not reveal its current user base.

Freecharge was acquired by Snapdeal in 2015.

Paytm launched its digital wallet in 2014. China’s Ant Financial, an Alibaba spin-off, has invested more than US$680 million in the company since then. The company now also has a payments bank license from the Reserve Bank of India.

Freecharge, on the other hand, has been scouting for investors to raise more funds since 2015, when it became Snapdeal’s subsidiary company. Despite rumors, the startup hasn’t yet received fresh funds to go after its rivals in full steam.

The government’s move to invalidate high-currency notes in November also worked in Paytm’s favor. The company touched a record 5 million transactions a day as cash withdrawals from ATMs were stalled.

Freecharge also saw a 70 percent increase in transactions, the company said, but the average transaction value went down.

Smartphone boom

The service will benefit from its partnership with Indus, gaining access to a large pool of users.

“We see the highest traction in mobile recharges for prepaid, which account for nearly 90 percent of the market. Moreover, most of them are used by the non-English speaking population,” Govind says, explaining why the partnership with Indus is crucial.

He expects the traffic on Freecharge to go up by almost 30 percent by the end of March.

The OS is available in 12 regional languages – Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. It’s bundled with about 70 percent of the low-cost Micromax phones (which cost below US$150). Indus is also the default OS for other homegrown brands such as Karbonn and Intex.

This is the first time Indus is tying up with a services company to offer a bundled application.

Indus is adding close to half a million new users every month and “expects to increase the rate of new additions to a million in six months,” according to Indus OS CEO Rakesh Deshmukh. The company has set a target of 100 million users by 2018.

Rakesh wants to add more such default applications on its OS to increase the amount of time a user spends on it.

The top-up feature on Indus OS will allow users to track usage and pay for prepaid connections using Freecharge. It will also inform users of spending and data usage patterns. The app will push analytics to users in real time.

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from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/freecharge-partners-indus
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