FreeCharge digital wallet launched; security is the prime concern says co-founder Kunal Shah

Looks like we have finally started setting pace in the digital wallet era. The newest entrant is the FreeCharge Digital Wallet. It was launched in partnership with YES bank at an event held in Bangalore today.

The Freecharge app team demonstrated the recharge using the wallet and it took mere 12 seconds. You can also take a look to know how it fares against Paytm.

With an ecosystem of 8.2 million daily unique  users, four million monthly engaged hours, 15 million stored cards, combined with GMV of over USD 4 billion. The company claims that FreeCharge digital wallet is all set to become the most used wallet in the six months.

In addition to a large and robust network of merchant partners, FreeCharge will partner with FINO, a payments bank licensee to build scale and ability to reach even the under-served. It leverages enabling technologies such as HCE, NFC, QR code and BLE to bring in efficiencies in the consumers’purchase experience.

Kunal Bahl, CEO and co-founder, Snapdeal said, “Our aim is to bring in efficiencies in payments using digital commerce to cater to every consumption need that a user may have. Consumer needs are constantly evolving and we feel it is the right time to launch a trusted and feature-rich digital wallet service. At Snapdeal, we are building an ecosystem that powers billions of digital commerce transactions. With the launch of the FreeCharge Digital Wallet, we will now play an even more intrinsic role in our customers’ lives.”

Taking about security, Kunal Shah, CEO and co-founder, FreeCharge told Firstpost, “Security is our no. 1 focus. We are a PC SSID level one focus company with top certifications for payments in the country. Also, we are looking at building some amazing technology. One of the main thing is to gain trust of our customers. We are striving to not have a single instance, where the customer has any issue.”

The Wallet works with an authentication, so you need to enter a pin each time you want to do a transaction. Even if you lose your hardware what you store in the memory will be there. Once you login and authenticate you can do more transactions.

He further explained, “There is a threshold on what value of transactions we want to add extra restrictions. If you have been using accounts from different device then there will be extra security feature. We will see the pattern of your recharges to know if its really you. Likewise, there are several layers of security.”