Mobile Wallets Adoption in India

According to Jitendra Gupta the MD and Founder of Citrus Pay, “Mobile wallet is a recent phenomenon. Its adoption will take time as it is a habit change experience for users as they are migrating from cash to wallet experience.”

According to Ajit Narayan the social media head of MobiKwik, “The adoption of mobile wallet is increasing along with its awareness, over the last financial year, MobiKwik’s user base has grown by close to 300% and has reached over 15 million now. One must realise that this also like internet 20 years back is new technology and hence will have a ‘warming up’ period. However, the pace will be much faster, and we are already witnessing some disruptive growth. We expect all the 900 million phone users in India to eventually start making payments using their device and via a mobile wallet. The primary drivers for this would be education & awareness about the concept driving fast adoption. Mobile wallets can do everything that cash or card can do and way better at it.”

According to Amit Lakhotia the vice president of Paytm, “Mobile wallet adoption is growing rapidly in India and people are becoming more and more comfortable using the same. Consumers are becoming comfortable saving their cards and keeping money in these wallets. We now have more than 20000 merchants where the user can pay with Paytm wallet.” Further talking about its adoption, he said, “This being a new product, consumer education is important. We are making it easier for consumers to use wallet at more locations. Till now we have focused a lot on online merchants and now we are expanding the scope to include the offline merchants as well. Similarly, we are also making it easier for users to add money in wallet using cash as well.”

According to Udit Sharma the vice president of Oxigen wallet, “Users can be classified into four categories. First category is of people who have credit/debit cards and are at ease using that mode of payment. Second category is of people who have cards but still prefer using COD. Third category is people who do not have cards, so they must use COD. And the fourth category is of people who want to use COD, but merchants do not deliver products to their pin codes. Mobile wallet addresses issues of all four categories of people. It caters to user’s convenience over using cards. Availability of a person to make COD is mandatory, however with the wallet this problem also gets solved. It a tough pull for the industry to get all COD users to mobile wallet but ultimately it holds an immense scope. There is no doubt that mobile wallets will take off. Coming from Oxigen our philosophy is that we don’t hold the right to call ourselves a mobile wallet unless we replicate all the functionality of a real physical wallet. A mobile wallet should address its users as well as merchant’s needs (such as convenience, security concerns and a merchant-user end to end relationship), only then will there be a true adoption of wallet in this country.”

According to Bipin Preet Singh who is the Founder and CEO of MobiKwik, “There are two primary factors for mobile wallet adoption. First is that banks have not done a great job in terms of technology or premium infrastructure so there is a need and space for alternative systems like mobile wallet to emerge. Second factor is that India is a cash majority country and there is huge scope in getting the cash converted into digital money.”