siliconindia | | December 20169By offering cash-backs and associating with companies providing items of daily utility, mobile wallets are successful in becoming a household namereferral schemes. The colossal effort in the beginning played a significant role in transforming the payments habits and concerting the much-re-quired shift in the consumer behav-ior. By offering cash-backs and as-sociating with companies providing items of daily utility, including bis-cuits and two minute noodles, mobile wallets were successful in becom-ing a household name, at least in the urban dwelling. While it worked in attracting the eyeballs, soon the industry was con-fronted by a typical case of Cobra effect. Bigger players with a more privileged funding status diverted in their favor the traction gained by other players. Soon, simply providing cash backs was no longer enough from a strategy point of view and mobile wal-lets with the right wherewithal, shifted to building a loyal customer base for themselves. Technology is the key to leverage the scalability of wallets' us-age. Payment processing players like Telr, with its strong risk management and anti-fraud solution, can enable wallet players to see increase in trans-actions for its online sellers with less-er fraud in such transactions. This allows the mobile wallet players to actively indulge with the community. As a direct consequence, digital payments became more dem-ocratic, now also reaching out to the unbanked sections in the economy. In fact, payment-processing players like Telr can facilitate merchant on-boarding as they partner with banks. Banks play a critical role in helping these payment processors to on-board merchants in less than two weeks to four weeks. It is also incredible to wit-ness how mobile wallets revised their business models to be more inclusive of the different section in the Indian economy. Tier-II and III towns & cities stand to be benefited from the next wave of innovation by the payments players. With 61 million smartphone users in these parts of the country, there is al-ready a significant potential that waits to be leveraged skillfully. OxigenWal-let also contributed towards helping the economy evolve, whilst support-ing its business model. From offline retail kiosks to assisted e-Commerce models, Oxigen worked at the level of grassroots, ensuring financial in-clusion. It doesn't come as a surprise now that the payment startups have be-come an apple of the eyes of investors. As per CB Insights, payments start-ups have crossed over $3.8 billion of funding. The faith shown by the in-vestors in the mobile payments arena is a sign of the massive innovations that are in order. In the near future, payment activation is slated to be via mobile and other technologies, not re-quiring physical contact. The process is going to transpire in real-time, ef-ficient and secure. Payment methods like Mobile wallets are going to play a significant role in this new paradigm and will be confronted with a bigger challenge of going beyond the current mechanism. Doubts, on part of the consumers are expected and hence, mobile wallets will be seen investing in ways to gain customer loyalty in-stead of only acquiring. Customers are calling the shots of this transformation. With more competition and awareness, customers have to be retained and no longer be just acquired. ReceivingProcessing
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