Freecharge elevates Snapdeal veteran Ankit Khanna as COO

Khanna's elevation comes two days after Snapdeal appointed Jason Kothari as Freecharge CEO

Just two days after taking over as the CEO of digital payments firm Freecharge, Jason Kothari has elevated Ankit Khanna to the position of chief operating officer, as he looks to turn around the failing fortunes of a company that has failed to keep pace with rival Paytm.

Khanna, a Snapdeal veteran who joined the e-commerce company back in 2010 served as the chief product officer of Freecharge prior to being promoted. The top management rejig at Freecharge comes after Govind Rajan quit the company from the position of CEO in February.

"We are proud to announce Ankit's elevation as the COO of FreeCharge," said Kothari. "He (Khanna) has also helped build highly complex and scalable products encompassing various aspects of e-commerce and digital payments ecosystem and helped build a frictionless user experience."

Apart from serving as COO, Khanna will also handle the portfolio of Product, User Growth, User Experience and Business Development at Freecharge.

Freecharge is currently seen as struggling, with parent Snapdeal failing to secure external funding from the likes of PayPal to fund the digital payments company. After registering a loss of Rs 235 crore in FY16 and eroding the complete net worth of the company, Snapdeal has been forced to pump in a further $20 million into Freecharge to manage capital expenses.

In addition to Freecharge's pain, parent Snapdeal too is seen as struggling to raise capital to compete with rivals Flipkart, Paytm and Amazon. A Livemint report on Tuesday suggested that Snapdeal was in talks with Flipkart and Snapdeal to sell its e-commerce business to them.

Softbank, the largest investor in Snapdeal, has marked down the valuation of the company in the nine months that ended December 2016, signifying a loss of confidence. The Japanese firm has slowed its investments in India down to a crawl after its biggest bets Snapdeal and Ola have come under attack from global giants Amazon and Uber, respectively.

Some have suggested Kothari, who moved to Snapdeal after successfully leading the acquisition of Housing.com (another of Softbank's bets in India), was roped in by the investor to exert more control.