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Freecharge Launches Social Pay Feature

Freecharge Launches Social Pay Feature
Conceptual view about checkouts or payments over Internet and mobile devices.
sb-borg via Getty Images
Conceptual view about checkouts or payments over Internet and mobile devices.

Freecharge, India's top digital wallet, has launched 'Chat and Pay' -- a service that allows friends pay each other from the app with the simple touch of a button.

Apart from easy peer-to-peer transfers, payment for services to local merchants such as the grocer, taxi and auto drivers and other small vendors can now be done through the app. The person-to-merchant service will help users pay easily and cashless.

"Chat is easiest to use for most of the smartphone users. Also, when we go out somewhere it is harder to split and pay everyone as you have to get each others' bank account details and add them. Freecharge chat and pay will allow you to acknowledge the good time you had and will make the payments less awkward and fast," Freecharge's COO Govind Rajan told HuffPost India.

"It is also easy for merchants to get more customers through this. There are many places where cash and card won't work. So people can pay through their freecharge account too. A lot of local vendors today chat on whatsapp with customers, so they won't feel that the interface is very different," he said.

Merchants have to register themselves on the app to receive payments. The company claims that the onboarding process will be very easy. The merchant can get up to ₹10000 per month in their wallet without any proof. If they want a bigger cap they can submit their KYC documents and we will extend the wallet limit till ₹100000.

If the merchant submits the bank details to Freecharge, they can also transfer the money to the bank accounts. "Initially the transfer to the bank if free for the merchants but later on, we might introduce some charges", said Rajan.

He was confident about the adoption of the feature. "As we endeavour to build the Payment OS for digital India, we seek to solve the challenge of merchant acceptance. We have introduced Chat and Pay and it is not just a way to pay but an engaging way for commerce," he said.

Freecharge is also giving benefits to customers of finding the stores nearby which accepts chat and pay. You can search for the merchants using #paytag in your area. The merchant will geotag his store while signing up so that customers can easily search for it.

Snapdeal owned company recently surpassed one million transactions on their Freecharge Go card. According to Nielsen Freecharge is the second most used payment service in India. The digital payment market is getting hotter in India as Flipkart and Amazon have recently launched their own payment services.In other news, PayTM has tied up with cinema houses such as INOX and PVR for movie ticket payments.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.