PayU India To Shut Down Its Mobile Wallet 'PayU Money' Operations By 31st January

Digital payments gateway PayU India, which is backed by South Africa's Nasper, is shutting down its mobile wallet-- PayU Money-- and will focus on its credit-based product LazyPay to push its consumer facing business, reported Times of India.

PayU will be closing down all the services of PayU Money wallet on 31st January 2018.

PayU will continue to offer its wallet services through Citrus even though it may not aggressively push it from now on.

Since early 2017, PayU has been focusing its energies in building its consumer vertical and launched its flagship product ‘LazyPay’. LazyPay is PayU India's flagship offering that allows consumers to pay later for goods purchased.

LazyPay is currently live on merchants such as PVR, Box8, Zomato, Jazz Cinemas, Netmeds and Innerchef, D Vois, AbhiBus, Fasoos, FreshMenu and many more.

Notably, after buying out Citrus Pay in 2016, PayU ended up having two mobile wallet entities so for the very reason along with few other the company is shutting down its mobile wallet service.

Additionally, in a statement given to ToI, PayU India MD Jitendra Gupta also confirmed that PayU is also slated to bring German credit startup Kreditech to India next financial year.

Last month, Indian cab hailing startup Ola has roped in PayU India co-founder Nitin Gupta to head its financial services business -- Ola Money.

PayU is now betting on different other segments to dominate the fintech space in India by tapping small businesses (both exports and imports), data and credit. Moreover, the company has also made three startup investments in companies —Kreditech, Paysense and ZestMoney — for consumer and SME lending.

PayU India To Shut Down Its Mobile Wallet 'PayU Money' Operations By 31st January

Digital payments gateway PayU India, which is backed by South Africa's Nasper, is shutting down its mobile wallet-- PayU Money-- and will focus on its credit-based product LazyPay to push its consumer facing business, reported Times of India.

PayU will be closing down all the services of PayU Money wallet on 31st January 2018.

PayU will continue to offer its wallet services through Citrus even though it may not aggressively push it from now on.

Since early 2017, PayU has been focusing its energies in building its consumer vertical and launched its flagship product ‘LazyPay’. LazyPay is PayU India's flagship offering that allows consumers to pay later for goods purchased.

LazyPay is currently live on merchants such as PVR, Box8, Zomato, Jazz Cinemas, Netmeds and Innerchef, D Vois, AbhiBus, Fasoos, FreshMenu and many more.

Notably, after buying out Citrus Pay in 2016, PayU ended up having two mobile wallet entities so for the very reason along with few other the company is shutting down its mobile wallet service.

Additionally, in a statement given to ToI, PayU India MD Jitendra Gupta also confirmed that PayU is also slated to bring German credit startup Kreditech to India next financial year.

Last month, Indian cab hailing startup Ola has roped in PayU India co-founder Nitin Gupta to head its financial services business -- Ola Money.

PayU is now betting on different other segments to dominate the fintech space in India by tapping small businesses (both exports and imports), data and credit. Moreover, the company has also made three startup investments in companies —Kreditech, Paysense and ZestMoney — for consumer and SME lending.

BOB, Times Internet In Talks To Acquire Jasper Infotech's E-wallet FreeCharge

Jasper Infotech-owned digital wallet FreeCharge is in talks with Bank of Baroda (BOB) and Times Internet for an all-cash acquisition. According to a report, the deal size is expected to be in the range of $60 - $75 million. This deal will allow BOB to expand its mobile wallet service, M-Clip which was launched last year and also to get access to millions of young customers FreeCharge has on its platform

Whereas with this deal Times Internet looks to add the wallet service to its online ventures like as Indiatimes Shopping and Gaana to name few.

Prior to this, it was reported that both Paytm and MobiKwik are also in talks for the FreeCharge acquisition. While Paytm has already signed a non-exclusive term sheet with FreeCharge at an expected deal value of $45 – $90 million, MobiKwik deal has still not moved beyond speculation.

Founded in 2010 by Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon, FreeCharge was acquired by Snapdeal in April 2015 for $450 million which is currently valued at less than 80%. Not only this, recently it also received an investment of $3.38 million from Jasper Infotech.

Company backed by investors such as Valiant Capital Management, Tybourne Capital Management, and Sequoia Capital had secured total of $177.65 million in six rounds of funding including the funds infused by its parent company.

These acquisition talks have come into picture at a time when parent company Snapdeal is already on the verge of finalizing a merger deal with it rival firm Flipkart.

BOB, Times Internet In Talks To Acquire Jasper Infotech's E-wallet FreeCharge

Jasper Infotech-owned digital wallet FreeCharge is in talks with Bank of Baroda (BOB) and Times Internet for an all-cash acquisition. According to a report, the deal size is expected to be in the range of $60 - $75 million. This deal will allow BOB to expand its mobile wallet service, M-Clip which was launched last year and also to get access to millions of young customers FreeCharge has on its platform

Whereas with this deal Times Internet looks to add the wallet service to its online ventures like as Indiatimes Shopping and Gaana to name few.

Prior to this, it was reported that both Paytm and MobiKwik are also in talks for the FreeCharge acquisition. While Paytm has already signed a non-exclusive term sheet with FreeCharge at an expected deal value of $45 – $90 million, MobiKwik deal has still not moved beyond speculation.

Founded in 2010 by Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon, FreeCharge was acquired by Snapdeal in April 2015 for $450 million which is currently valued at less than 80%. Not only this, recently it also received an investment of $3.38 million from Jasper Infotech.

Company backed by investors such as Valiant Capital Management, Tybourne Capital Management, and Sequoia Capital had secured total of $177.65 million in six rounds of funding including the funds infused by its parent company.

These acquisition talks have come into picture at a time when parent company Snapdeal is already on the verge of finalizing a merger deal with it rival firm Flipkart.

Why Mobile Wallets are Worried with the RBI Norms?

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) issued guidelines for prepaid payment instrument (PPI) licence holders in March. Mobile wallet companies expressed their concerns to RBI officials over the proposed guidelines for the sector, in their formal feedback to the regulator on them. One of the issues included the know your customer (KYC) norms.

The Payment Council of India and the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) had arranged a meeting in which they gave out feedback on the proposed norms. Some clarifications were sought on certain clauses in the meeting, while the companies discussed issues around KYC as the norms could be an overkill for small transactions.

As per the KYC norms, companies will have to convert existing wallets without complete KYC to full KYC compliant wallets within a period of 60 days from the date of issue. If they fail to do so, no further credit will be allowed into these wallets. Currently, e-wallets and other such prepaid payment instruments can only hold up to Rs 20,000 per user with minimum KYC.

The main request given by the companies in their feedback to the RBI was that minimum KYC be retained or the deadline for implementing full KYC be extended to 18-24 months. The reason being that telecom companies would have done Aadhaar linking of mobile numbers, which will be useful to mobile wallets to do full KYC for all their clients. They also said that KYC norms will increase customer acquisition costs for them and a simple process will get complicated. The other request to RBI was to publish the interoperability guidelines for wallets.

Other norms in which they objected include:

• Assurance of a separate login provided for the the PPI account by mobile wallet companies, ensuring that access to PPI is not made part of access to other services offered by the issuer or its associate/parent/group company etc.


• Requirement to have a minimum net worth of Rs 25 crore, as compared to the existing minimum of Rs 1 crore.


• Necessary agreement requirement of wallet services with the e-commerce platforms and payment gateways rather than individual merchants. The companies will have to submit the list of merchants it hosts to the bank and timely update it.

PPIs are currently seeing monthly transactions of Rs 6,000 crore, of which about Rs 4,000 crore is from money transfers while corporate solutions such as smart cards for expense management constitute about Rs 500 crore, as per people with knowledge of the matter. Ecommerce giant Amazon recently received a wallet licence from RBI.

Samsung To Launch 'Samsung Pay', Its Mobile Payment in India

Post the demonetisation announcement, India saw the popularity of its mobile payment service sector increasing by many folds. While the already existing players in the market jumped to action to cash on the opportunity, several new one came up to get a piece of the pie. And now, it seems, Samsung is all ready to debut itself mobile payment service called Samsung Pay in India very soon.

While the tech biggie hasn't made an official announcement about the launch yet, but it did drop in some hints recently.

Yesterday, Samsung rolled out the much-awaited Android Nougat update to its Galaxy S7 and S7 edge devices. The users, when turned on their devices after the update was completed, saw a message saying “The future of payments is coming soon!” This signalled that Samsung has something planned for making payments by mobile sleeker than ever in India. At the top of it, the Nougat update also brought the Samsung Pay app to the company’s flagship devices, cementing the earlier signal that said the future of payments is coming soon to India.

Samsung seems to have adopted tease but don't say anything strategy for launching Samsung Pay in India, and as far we can say and assess, it surely is proving out to be a huge success and has got many people interested in what's coming.

Samsung Pay has been having a good run in a lot of countries around the world and has acquired a unique status in the global mobile payment service sector. One of the things that makes it stand out from the rest in the market is the fact that it makes use of both Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) as well as NFC. For the unversed, MST supports supports older magnetic credit card machines as well. Both NFC and MST support makes Samsung Pay compatible with a majority of card readers and hence users will be able to make use of the service in a majority of restaurants, shops, and petrol pumps etc. across the nation.

Keep watching this space to know the exact date when Samsung Pay will hit the Indian market.

[Top Image: cbronline.com]

BHIM App will be Available on iOS in 10 Days

BHIM, the unified app for UPI-based payments launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on December 30th last year, has been generating a lot of buzz since its launch. According to a recent tweet put up by Amitabh Kant, CEO, Niti Aayog, the BHIM app has been successful in crossing 3 million downloads in just five days since its launch with over 500,000 transactions done. But, unfortunately, iOS users have been missing out on all the action since the app was only available for Android users. Well, not anymore.

The BHIM app, which has been developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), is expected to make its iOS debut in about 10 days from now. Along with the iOS version, the app, which is currently only available in Hindi and English, will also come out with several more multilingual versions.

BHIM in the BHIM app stands for Bharat Interface for Money. The app, which is topping the Google Play Store charts in India just a few days after its launch, has been named BHIM after Babasaheb Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar.

The app allows payments via the United Payments Interface (UPI), which makes sure that money is debited or credited directly to a user’s bank account. For those users who don't have UPI on their bank accounts yet, BHIM also supports transfers via MMID and IFSC code. UPI payments is preferred as against any other method as it only requires a Virtual Payee Address and a user doesn’t have to remember and share his/her bank details, thus reducing the risks of any fraud or theft. BHIM is also expected to support Aadhaar-based payments in the future.



The BHIM app binds together with the user’s device and mobile number. The users are required to set up a pin to login into the BHIM app each time they want to use it. There's another pin called the UPI Pin, which is required to carry out the transactions on the app.

For those sceptical about using the app due to the recent fraud and theft cases regarding mobile payments, the BHIM app developers have a three factors of authentication at place. There's one that binds the app with the device and mobile number, the second one that requires a login pin, and finally, the third one in which a separate authentication pin is required. To make the security tighter, even for regenerating their UPI Pin, a user is required to have access to their debit card details.

The government has also decided to provide UPI payments integration to USSD platform where a user can just simply dial *99# from their feature phones or even smartphones and carry out UPI based transactions without having to depend on the internet. Since India has an internet penetration of just 34.8 %, this move was well-needed.

What's interesting to note is that Paytm, one of the most famous and used mobile wallets in India after the demonetisation phase is also supporting UPI to let users load their wallets. As previously stated, UPI is a direct bank-to-bank payment method, but for now the BHIM app has put a daily limit of Rs. 20,000.

[Top Image: digit.in]

Facebook Is Quitely Turning Messenger Into A Mobile Wallet

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has big plans for his Messenger app. After making the app mandatory to download to read and send messages through Facebook on mobile phones, the social networking giant now again plans to revamp the app, this time into a "Everything App".

According to reports doing round in the tech world, Facebook is soon going to give a major makeover to the Messenger App and this change will transform the mobile application into something more than just a simple messaging app. One of the major changes that we could see in the app in the coming times is the mobile wallet feature. The new code found inside the app would soon make digital transactions or even paying for physical goods in retail stores through the app a reality. This is expected to take place in the app'a forthcoming update.

Whether Facebook plans to go all out in the arena with other similar wallet services like Android Pay or Apple Pay, or whether it will take support of these services is something which is currently unclear.

But, the latter part seems to have more chances of becoming a reality as Zuckerberg in January had given a statement stating that Facebook is considering partnering with everyone who does payments.

During a conference call with investors, he had stressed on home impressed he was with Apple Pay, he said "We look at the stuff that Apple is doing with Apple Pay, for example, as a really neat innovation in the space that takes a lot of friction out of transactions as well."

Facebook has no plans to rake in more money in its account through its this move, rather it wants to encash on the current boom in the e-commerce and take its advertising business to a whole new level.

Further, in addition to the payment wallet feature, the new code also contains commands for Facebook users to make full use of the highly potential “suggested businesses” feature. This means that the social networking giant will now study its users behaviour and "likes" online and use this information to assist them towards relevant businesses on the Messenger App.

Since March last year, Facebook has already lured in around two dozen businesses to set up their official accounts on Messenger. Everlane, the clothing retailer was one of the first ones to set up its account and the app and it currently has two customers service agents communicating with over 200 U.S. customers on a daily basis about their various inquiries regarding about their shipments.

More businesses are expected to make their way to Messenger after the company's forthcoming F8 conference in April.

While Facebook seems to have the right skeleton ready, now all it really boils down to is the right execution. Keep checking this space for more update on this after the F8 conference.

Facebook Is Quitely Turning Messenger Into A Mobile Wallet

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has big plans for his Messenger app. After making the app mandatory to download to read and send messages through Facebook on mobile phones, the social networking giant now again plans to revamp the app, this time into a "Everything App".

According to reports doing round in the tech world, Facebook is soon going to give a major makeover to the Messenger App and this change will transform the mobile application into something more than just a simple messaging app. One of the major changes that we could see in the app in the coming times is the mobile wallet feature. The new code found inside the app would soon make digital transactions or even paying for physical goods in retail stores through the app a reality. This is expected to take place in the app'a forthcoming update.

Whether Facebook plans to go all out in the arena with other similar wallet services like Android Pay or Apple Pay, or whether it will take support of these services is something which is currently unclear.

But, the latter part seems to have more chances of becoming a reality as Zuckerberg in January had given a statement stating that Facebook is considering partnering with everyone who does payments.

During a conference call with investors, he had stressed on home impressed he was with Apple Pay, he said "We look at the stuff that Apple is doing with Apple Pay, for example, as a really neat innovation in the space that takes a lot of friction out of transactions as well."

Facebook has no plans to rake in more money in its account through its this move, rather it wants to encash on the current boom in the e-commerce and take its advertising business to a whole new level.

Further, in addition to the payment wallet feature, the new code also contains commands for Facebook users to make full use of the highly potential “suggested businesses” feature. This means that the social networking giant will now study its users behaviour and "likes" online and use this information to assist them towards relevant businesses on the Messenger App.

Since March last year, Facebook has already lured in around two dozen businesses to set up their official accounts on Messenger. Everlane, the clothing retailer was one of the first ones to set up its account and the app and it currently has two customers service agents communicating with over 200 U.S. customers on a daily basis about their various inquiries regarding about their shipments.

More businesses are expected to make their way to Messenger after the company's forthcoming F8 conference in April.

While Facebook seems to have the right skeleton ready, now all it really boils down to is the right execution. Keep checking this space for more update on this after the F8 conference.

Now, Oxigen lets you send money through social networks

Oxigen, which is a payment solutions provider, unveiled its mobile wallet service called the Oxigen Wallet two days back. Through this mobile wallet service, the users will be able to buy gifts, transfer money to their family and friends using the social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc..

Besides providing all these facilities, the users will also be able to pay bills, recharge their mobile phones, and shop online using their Oxigen wallet.

Pramod Saxena, who is Chairman and Managing Director at Oxigen, gave a statement to PTI on this occasion and said “Ours is the country’s first social mobile service through which people can share money with their friends and family over their preferred social networks and messaging platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Google+, and Twitter ”.

According to him, the mobile wallet service will find a huge user base in the youth of the country who regularly go out for meals with their friends, split the amount of the bills and send small but frequent gifts to each other.  The youth can also use the service to get their Smartphones recharged, and payment for service like buying a pizza, booking travel or movie tickets, download music or movies etc.

The mobile wallet service is driven by a mobile application, which can be downloaded from the Google Play Store and Apple store. Anyone with a mobile handset can download the app and use it as the service is telecom operator and bank agnostic.

Cash needs to be loaded into the mobile wallet, once the user has downloaded the app.  Cash can be loaded into the wallet through a credit card, debit card or by going to selected corporate outlets such as “The Mobile Store.”

RBI has capped the amount of money that can be transferred through such services at five thousand rupees per transaction.

The users can also send videos, audio, text messages and photos along with their money in order to personalize the money transfer.

The company has already processed over two billion payment transactions, through banking websites, small retail and modern retail chains.

The company has partnered with a Singapore headquartered Company called Fastacash to provide this service.  Fastacash is a global platform which allows its users to transfer airtime, money and other token of values through social networking sites.

Now, Oxigen lets you send money through social networks

Oxigen, which is a payment solutions provider, unveiled its mobile wallet service called the Oxigen Wallet two days back. Through this mobile wallet service, the users will be able to buy gifts, transfer money to their family and friends using the social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc..

Besides providing all these facilities, the users will also be able to pay bills, recharge their mobile phones, and shop online using their Oxigen wallet.

Pramod Saxena, who is Chairman and Managing Director at Oxigen, gave a statement to PTI on this occasion and said “Ours is the country’s first social mobile service through which people can share money with their friends and family over their preferred social networks and messaging platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Google+, and Twitter ”.

According to him, the mobile wallet service will find a huge user base in the youth of the country who regularly go out for meals with their friends, split the amount of the bills and send small but frequent gifts to each other.  The youth can also use the service to get their Smartphones recharged, and payment for service like buying a pizza, booking travel or movie tickets, download music or movies etc.

The mobile wallet service is driven by a mobile application, which can be downloaded from the Google Play Store and Apple store. Anyone with a mobile handset can download the app and use it as the service is telecom operator and bank agnostic.

Cash needs to be loaded into the mobile wallet, once the user has downloaded the app.  Cash can be loaded into the wallet through a credit card, debit card or by going to selected corporate outlets such as “The Mobile Store.”

RBI has capped the amount of money that can be transferred through such services at five thousand rupees per transaction.

The users can also send videos, audio, text messages and photos along with their money in order to personalize the money transfer.

The company has already processed over two billion payment transactions, through banking websites, small retail and modern retail chains.

The company has partnered with a Singapore headquartered Company called Fastacash to provide this service.  Fastacash is a global platform which allows its users to transfer airtime, money and other token of values through social networking sites.