SBI, Axis & Yes Bank gear up to take on Paytm, Mobikwik

MUMBAI: Shaken by the online shopping frenzy, a string of high-street banks like SBI, Axis and Yes will launch mobile wallets to take on pre-paid issuers like Paytm and MobiKwik who lure customers with easy payment option and attractive retail offerings.

M-wallets — electronic saving accounts that can be used for shopping using mobile handsets — would help banks overcome the edge that pre-paid users have. Till now, banks have been pushing products like internet banking and credit or debit cards as more and more customers turn familiar with online transactions.

But even as card spends rose, banks were with competition from a new animal - m-wallets. These new breed of service providers had an advantage over banks: while a bank customer using debit or credit card for online payment has to key in details like the 11-digit card number, the card's expiry date and card verification value, a m-wallet user can close a transaction by keying in a single 4- or 5-digit password.

Since bank details of customers are already electronically stored in the m-wallet, multiple layers in a transaction are done away with.

For the young and the affluent, often shopping while on the move, m-Wallets appeared irresistible.

By tying up with enough merchants and e-commerce sites, banks hope their m-wallets would be as convenient as those offered by players like Paytm, Citrus, Oxigen and MobiKwik.

"The growth is so dramatic that everybody, including banks, are going to participate in it...We don't know whether this is a passing phase or this is going to continue. So you are going to see everyone create their own wallet," said Jairam Sridharan, president and head retail lending and payments at Axis Bank.

According to RBI data, transactions from m-wallets have surged three-fold to Rs 8,180 crore in 2014-15 over the previous year. The number of transactions rose from 106 million to 255 million in 2014-15.

E-commerce transactions have multiplied with smartphones becoming cheaper and telcos competing with each other to sell affordable internet data plans to users.

Bankers like Sridharan are possibly betting on the possibility that it would not be sustainable for pre-paid issuers-cume-commerce companies to go on attracting customers with fabulous discounts and cash-back offers.

So far, ICICI Bank India's largest private bank and second-largest lender, is the only bank to have launched m-wallet. According to a recent report by Motilal Oswal, a broker, "Use of m-wallets will further reduce dependence of bank accounts. These players are using the prepaid medium as an alternative to bank deposit usage," said the report.

Sources said that Axis Bank SBI and Yes BankBSE -1.21 % are likely to launch their respective m-wallets within the next few months. The Yes Bank wallet, said a spokesperson for the bank, can be accessed not just on smartphones but also on Facebook. "Yes Bank's wallet is designed in a way that the users can send and request money from any of the Facebook friend or phone book contacts. Also, users can split bills among themselves... Among other things, it would facilitate railway bookings and toll payments," he said.

As of now, there are about 115 million m-wallet users, of which 75 million are said to users of Paytm wallets. ICICI Bank's m-wallet — 'Pocket', launched in February, has been downloaded by 1 million handset users.