Freecharge to adopt Aadhaar for KYC

Company says being Aadhaar enabled is key to mass adoption and ubiquitous usage

FreeCharge, digital wallet owned by Snapdeal, on Monday said that it would adopt Aadhaar as a know your customer identity (KYC) tool for customers who can enhance their wallets to Rs 1 lakh from Rs 10,000.

FreeCharge, which has around a million wallet users, says that being Aadhaar enabled is key to mass adoption and ubiquitous usage. The firm has partnered with YES bank and FINO, the payments bank licensee. With YES Bank, customers can authenticate their KYC formalities with over 30,000 banking correspondent points.

"For consumers, convenience and speed of transaction are key considerations. We will leverage Aadhaar ID authetication, for paperless, secure KYC, to be completed in a few minutes. We are innovating to bring new models of go to market - for instance doorstep authentication - where customers can request for an agent to come to their home for a doorstep biometric authentication," said Govind Rajan, Chief Operating Officer, FreeCharge and Chief Strategy Officer, Snapdeal in a statement.

"Within a week we hit the one million mark and now leveraging Aadhar enabled KYC gives us access to the pool of over 900 million KYC ready consumers." Freecharge also plans to leverage Snapdeal's extensive delivery reach to scale the doorstep KYC model.

"With lakhs of deliveries a day on Snapdeal, we have a huge and relevant customer connect opportunity for us to synergise with for doorstep KYC. We will soon launch the pilot in metros and then scale this nationwide," said Govind.