Snapdeal and FreeCharge launch the mother of all mobile wallets in India

When ecommerce marketplace Snapdeal acquired mobile top-up site FreeCharge in April – the biggest acquisition in India to date – the promise was to build a digital commerce ecosystem. An important piece of that jigsaw fell into place today with the launch of a new mobile wallet by Snapdeal and FreeCharge jointly.

FreeCharge has been doing hundreds of thousands of mobile top-up transactions a day, mostly with credit or debit cards. Snapdeal also has tens of millions of mobile buyers active on its app. Between them, they have 87 million registered users, who will get app upgrades to be able to use the new wallet without any need for additional downloads. With 8.2 million daily unique users, 4 million monthly engaged hours, and 15 million stored cards – combined with a GMV (gross merchandize value) of over US$4 billion – Snapdeal and FreeCharge hope theirs will become the most used wallet in India.

At the launch event in Bangalore today, Snapdeal’s chief product officer, Anand Chandrasekaran, said this was the toughest product they had built so far. “Getting 87 million people to upgrade to a single account is no child’s play,” he pointed out.

Challenging Paytm

The wallet is being rolled out in partnership with Fino, one of the 11 companies to get payments banking licences from the Reserve Bank of India. It will be a challenge to Paytm, a leader in this space which has the backing of Alibaba’s Ant Financial and claims to have 25 million active wallets.

Snapdeal’s main rival Flipkart, meanwhile, bought a majority stake in payment services platform FX Mart earlier this month.

Payments and logistics are the two bugbears in Indian ecommerce, which makes today’s launch of a new digital wallet an important milestone. In the US, eBay benefited from a partnership with PayPal, while in China, Taobao worked out a similar deal with Alipay. The Snapdeal-FreeCharge wallet in India offers a similar facility.

“Our aim is to bring in efficiencies in payments using digital commerce to cater to every consumption need that a user may have. Consumer needs are constantly evolving and we feel it is the right time to launch a trusted and feature-rich digital wallet service,” said Kunal Bahl, CEO and co-founder, Snapdeal.

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