Airtel, Vodafone and Idea line up sops to lure merchants to payment apps

MUMBAI: As telecom companies intensify their competition on voice and data prices, they are also preparing to battle it out in another arena: getting merchants to use their digital payments solutions.

The big three — Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular — along with newcomer Reliance Jio Infocomm are scouring urban and rural areas and offering incentives to shop owners and retail chains to sign up with them.

The scramble to get merchants on board received a boost after the November 9 demonetisation, when the telcos realised they needed wider adoption of their payment solutions if they wanted their customere to increase the use of digital wallets. The telcos have sent out marketing teams to woo merchants with easy-to-handle mobile apps and the authority to offer discounts to customers.

The joining process is smooth, paperless and some also have the option of letting merchants withdraw cash from the telco’s outlets. The focus is on tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Reliance Jio has tied up with third-party aggregators such as Sahaj and StoreKing, which have access to customers and merchants in rural areas. Jio allows its merchants to offer discounts and coupons to customers who pay using JioMoney.

While Sahaj and StoreKing did not respond to queries that ETsent, the information of their tie-up with Jio is available on their websites. “To enable digital transactions, merchants are an important component of our economy. Jio is working to empower Indian merchants by building a digital retail ecosystem,” Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Industries, said in December when JioMoney Merchant Solutions was launched. “JioMoney is focused on signing up over 10 million small merchant retailers in the coming weeks across 17,000 towns and 4 lakh villages.”

Airtel Payments Bank, which Bharti Airtel started last week, does not charge merchants who adopt its services any processing fee. The No. 1telco aims to sign up over 5 million merchant partners. “Telcos can easily leverage their reach to get people on board their platform. The business model currently adopted by telcos is to acquire more users for their platform. This will evolve,” Hemant Joshi, senior lead analyst at Deloitte, told ET.

Vodafone, India’s No. 2 telco, has a special app for merchants called MPesa Pay and has its distribution teams across the country asking retail operators to sign up for it. Ekta Gupta, a department store owner, registered on M-Pesa Pay when she saw distributors convince all flat owners in a society to use their mobile wallets. Gupta, 33, said that she had digital wallets such as Paytm and also accepted Sodexo, but found this a safer option. After a purchase, the merchant sends a link to the customer, who opens it to make the payment and complete the transaction. Idea Cellular has also launched a payment solution app for merchants.