The demonetization drive is expanding the reach of the mobile wallet companies both in urban and rural India. Even the bank mobile wallets are showing improved growth.
Mobile wallets companies like Oxigen literally become the oxygen that is needed in many villages. The Oxigen micro ATMs allow you to cash in and cash out in the most rural areas. In fact, in parts of rural Bihar, the micro ATMS of Oxigen which are like PoS terminals working on GPRS, went door-to-door for deposit collection on the Aadhar enabled payment platform.
Also, with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) allowing the unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) to be used by mobile wallet companies from November 22, making online payments easier for the feature phone users.
Promod Saxena, CEO of Oxigen said, "We have about 150 million transacting customers and about 30 million wallets. With the Trai allowing the mobile wallet companies to use the USSD code, our transacting customers will turn into mobile wallets. PoS terminals, door-to-door deposit collection drive helped us cover remote villages where there are no merchants or a kirana store."
The current size of digital banking is around Rs 1.2 lakh crore. "This size has to increase from the current level to at least Rs 3 lakh crore, which is a conservative estimate of the gap between the actual currency in circulation and required currency in circulation," said a report from SBI's research wing, SBI Ecowrap.
Paytm, another visible mobile company with its huge advertising, has been a big boon for customers without hard cash.
Vijay shekhar, founder, told DNA Money that the company added 3 million customers in the last two weeks after demonetization, taking the total number customer base to 155 million. We are confident of crossing 200 crore transactions in a year and about 30,000 crore worth of business at the end of this financial year."
Shekhar expects India to leapfrog into a digitised country as rural poor also realize the conveniences of electronic payments. More than half of Paytm customer base is in tier 2 to tier 4 towns.
"The chaiwallas, the taxis, vegetable vendors, dhabas along the highways are all having our app and right now, all transaction cost both for the customers and the merchants are completely free," Shekhar adds.
Rajashekara V Maiya, AVP and head - product strategy, Infosys Finacle told DNA Money, "Pure wallet players are able to garner more customers within a short span of time based on attractive offering such as cashback, discounts and co-branded offering, but in the long run, when customers look beyond the wallet to areas such as lending, deposits and full fledged banking services, then the online companies will have to look at tie-ups with banks."
Oxigen, which already had a tie-up with Ratnakar Bank, is adding 3000 micro ATMs every month in 2016-17 and in the next financial, the company would add another 5000 micro ATMs a month already. The size of business is suddenly up with about Rs 4 lakh transactions worth Rs 100 crore, a jump from Rs 40 crore worth of transactions before demonetization.
Even before demonetization, Indian digital payments had been expected to shoot up. The market could be worth $500 billion by 2020, or 10 times current estimates, Google and Boston Consulting Group had said in a report in July this year.
Other mobile wallet companies Freecharge and MobiKwik also reported a sharp overnight jump on the quantum of money loaded on their wallets that are used to pay for utilities like cab rides, metro, phone recharges, electricity, gas, petrol, DTH.
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
 "mobile wallet")
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
)
)
)
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}