Digital war: Airtel, Voda, Idea woo merchants to use payments apps

Joining process is smooth and easy-to-handle, all offering exciting packages and discounts

Amid revenue losses on account of the government's demonetisation move, and competitive pressures intensified by extension of free services by Reliance Jio, older telecocompanies seem to have been forced to provide incentives to get merchants to opt for digital payment applications.

According to sectoral data, around 12 million more Indians have started using digital wallets. The reach of mobile payments rose six per cent in the week following the demonetisation announcement, while usage frequency surged 15 per cent, says Rajan Mathews, director-general at the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI).

Here’s what is in store:

1. Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, and the new entrant into the space, Reliance Jio, are offering incentives to shop owners and retail chains to sign up with them. Additionally, they are trying to capture more urban and rural areas under their bandwidth. The focus is on tier-2 and tier-3 cities.

2. The Airtel Bank will have a network of 250,000 banking points (Airtel retail stores) across 29 states from day one. This is more than the total number of ATMs in the country. 

3. The Airtel Bank allows money transfer to any bank account in India. Customers will also get the benefit of free money transfer from Airtel-to-Airtel numbers within the Airtel Payments Bank, personal accidental insurance of Rs 1 lakh with every savings account, and easy deposit and withdrawal facility across a wide network of Airtel retail outlets.

4. Vodafone has done a strategic partnership to facilitate cashless and secure disbursement and collection of loans for micro finance institutions. It claims the digitisation of disbursement has enabled speedy operations in this regard. Vodafone M-Pesa daily app downloads has doubled after the demonetisation announcement, reported Business Standard.

5. Reliance Jio has partnered with third-party aggregrators including, Sahai and StoreKing, which provides them access to customers and merchants in rural areas. Upon paying through JioMoney, customers are given discounts and coupons. Anil Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, said that JioMoney is focused on signing up over 10 million small merchant retailers in the coming weeks across 17,000 towns and 4 lakh villages, reported The Economic Times.

6. The joining process is smooth, easy-to-handle and almost all of them are offering exciting packages and discounts. Vodafone and Airtel are offering unlimited calling for recharges above Rs 144 and free roaming on their network and 50 Mb free data and for those above Rs 344 unlimited free calls and free roaming on all mobiles network and 300 mb free data for 4G handset users and 1 Gb data for 4G handset users.

The telecom enterprise business is estimated at Rs 40,000 crore a year, with the small and medium enterprise market size at between Rs 12,000 and Rs 14,000 crore. They have sought measures in the upcoming Budget to promote ease of doing business, incentives for R&D investments and push for domestic manufacturing.