Using one digital wallet instead of many is safer: Saranjeet Singh of PayU India

“The one thing that will really differentiate one wallet from another is sturdiness of the payment gateway. If the transactions fail twice, the user loses interest and may think of moving to another wallet”

Raushni Bhagia | Mumbai | May 3, 2016

Saranjeet Singh

The world is gradually going digital and so is money. Credit cards first made cashless purchases possible and the trend became more encompassing with the evolution of debit cards and smartcards acceptable at vending machines. Online payment wallets are now set to make paper currency less necessary, if not completely redundant, for the average consumer.

The use of cash for shopping has decreased significantly and is bound to go down further with the proliferation of online payment wallets like Citrus, PayU, Paytm and Oxigen. Online payment wallets have definitely created some excitement among consumers and merchants and made currency notes less visible in the marketplace.

To figure out how these wallets operate and help the last mile consumer, BestMediaInfo.com spoke to one of the significant players in the market, PayU India. Saranjeet Singh, Head - Digital Marketing, PayU India, took time off to chat with us. Excerpts:

What will prompt a consumer to pick one online wallet over another in the kind of fiercely competitive market that exists today, considering that all of them offer similar features?

The one thing that will really differentiate one wallet from another is sturdiness of the payment gateway. If the transactions fail twice, the user loses interest and may think of moving to another wallet. Our strong technology guarantees surety of payment and we are continuously working towards making it better. Other than that, we are trying to move to one-tap transactions to make things easier for the consumer.

There are a lot of website specific online wallets like Ola Money and Big Basket wallets. Are these more comfortable to use from the consumer's perspective?

At first glance, they may seem better because these websites are looking at easier, more convenient and safer payment options for themselves and for their consumers. However, using multiple wallets also implies saving your financial details, like credit card and net banking details, at multiple places. This increases the risk of a security breach. Safety increases if you use one wallet which is acceptable at as many places as possible.

Please tell us how PayU operates in India.

Well, we have two types of services, PayU Biz and PayU Money. PayU Money is a mass service which connects small and medium-scale enterprises through an online payment option, while PayU Biz does that for the bigger players and requires a continuous maintenance fee. PayU Money helps an SME businessman accept money through the online mode (PayU Wallet) and enables consumers to use the same PayU Wallet to make a payment online. PayU Biz operates in a similar fashion.

What is your market strategy?

To start with, we have decided to focus on people who accept payments, mainly the SMEs. We already have about 55,000 SMEs on board who are using PayU Money. We aim at taking this number to at least 1.5 lakh. Since it is a free product the SMEs can afford it easily, even though the challenges are immense. Once we reach about a million sellers using PayU Money, we will then target the consumers – the people who make the payments. For now, about eight million consumers are already using PayU money.

What kind of digital marketing initiatives does a brand like PayU take?

We are doing a lot of work on search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine management (SEM), and are tapping the social media too. So, yes, there are a lot of initiatives happening on Twitter and Facebook.

In your opinion, how different or important is marketing in digital medium for an online brand like PayU versus an offline product brand?

Basically, the objectives for any brand remain the same – sell more, get more users to think about it, specific TG, popularizing the tagline and participation of users. However, for an offline brand, like a chocolate brand for instance, the target can be to reach the consideration level of purchase decision. For online brands like us, the journey from awareness to consideration to purchase will be a quicker migration. Hence, the digital medium becomes very crucial for online brands. Also, for brands like ours, traditional media mix takes a long time for conversion from awareness to purchase since the users are probably not very aware of the online medium.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

Info@BestMediaInfo.com