Freecharge appoints Karthik Rajeshwaran as Director of Strategy

Rajeshwaran was earlier with Obi Mobiles as head of marketing

Snapdeal-owned digital payments platform Freecharge has appointed Karthik Rajeshwaran, former global head of marketing at Obi Mobiles, as its new director of strategy.

Rajeshwaran's appointment will help Freecharge build more consumer-centric features and products with understanding of what digital customers want. Moreover, his understanding of the consumer landscape in India could help Freecharge shape its services in the future.

"He brings in a fresh perspective and inspired energy to tread us in new and exciting directions. I am certain that with his insights on digital consumers and evolving digital habits, we will accelerate our innovations," said Govind Rajan, CEO at Freecharge, in a statement.

Prior to heading marketing at Obi, he worked at retail giant Unilever where he kicked off his career. Rajan too is a veteran from Unilever who then moved on to telecom giant Airtel to build its payment service Airtel Money before coming to Freecharge.

Freecharge competes with Paytm in the digital payments space, but has found it hard to sign up other large e-tailers as customers. Now Freecharge is trying to diversify itself to enable more online and offline transactions, moving beyond being being the payments provider for parent platform Snapdeal.

"With more and more of our lifestyle habits taking a digital avatar, our dependency on digital payments is unprecedented. It's an opportune time to be in the fintech space," said Rajeshwaran.