After an aggressive push in the ecommerce market in India, Amazon is now looking to establishing itself in the payments space. According to an Economic Times report, it is now planning to sign up government institution such as electricity boards and insurance companies to create use cases for Amazon Pay outside its ecommerce website.
After receiving its prepaid instrument (PPI) licence from RBI, Amazon Pay launched payments on some online services like food delivery players Faasos and Box8 and some house services applications like Housejoy.
It is now talking to state electricity boards and public insurance companies, a source told ET.
Amazon Pay’s competition in the Indian market is directly against market leader Paytm and other players like MobiKwik and Flipkart’s Phonepe. Despite being a late entrant, Amazon Pay is now looking at government institutions to grow in the country.
When Amazon India received its PPI licence, chief digital and data officer Sriraman Jagannathan indicated that the wallet will bring on board small value transactions to larger institutions like electricity payments, payment of insurance premiums, booking tickets on IRCTC, tie ups with state governments to pay for traffic challans and other use cases such as payment of fees to educational institutions.
While specific players it plans on tying up was not mentioned, an Amazon spokesperson told ET that it is always testing ways to improve experience for its customers and these experiments are part of that.
ET reports that the wallet is also looking at frequently transacting users and those from 2-tier locations and on low-bandwidth networks. It recently invested in point-of-sale machines and technology infrastructure to accept digital payments on delivery.
Currently, Amazon Pay allows users to add up to Rs 20,000 without KYC and also works with some offline merchants like Crocs and Café Coffee Day where it allows in-store payments through the wallet.
Most recently, Amazon Online Distribution, which houses Amazon Pay, infused Rs 67 crore from the parent company for the expansion of Amazon Pay in India.