Micromax to offer mobile wallet with smartphone

NEW DELHI: Micromax will integrate a mobile wallet into its smartphones by January as India’s largest home-bred handset maker moves towards offering software services, which will become a key differentiator in a hugely competitive and commoditised device market that is growing at breakneck speed.

The smartphone maker will begin introducing new models with pre-integrated wallets over the next three to four months and will enable existing smartphones through software updates, which will take the reach of the payment service to about 25 million connected mobile phones.

"The device is going to be more of a customer acquisition tool," Micromax co-founder Vikas Jain said, underlining the necessity of handset companies to go beyond hardware. "We are fortunate that that business remains profitable for us, but we have seen quite a lot of global unicorns not making money on the hardware."

With India’s first smartphone based native payments solution, Micromax intends to reach 10% of India’s billion-strong population in the next two years. The Gurgaon-based company has partnered with fintech provider TranServ to integrate payments with its service platform, which will allow users to do multiple financial transactions like sending or requesting money, splitting bills and making payments to contacts in the device address book.