The immediate demonetisation of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 currency notes by PM Narendra Modi has left people cashless and are facing some problems. However, this situation has proved beneficial to the digital wallet companies which are seeing enormous growth in their business.
Paytm Wallet is India’s largest mobile payment service platform with over 100 million wallets. Last week, the company announced that it will take a flat 1% fee to allow users to transfer money from their wallets to their bank accounts. Following this announcement, the rival mobile wallet company MobiKwik announced free bank account money transfer service i.e at 0% fee.
Now, in a move to remain competitive, Paytm has announced that it will also offer free transfer service to its KYC (Know Your Customer) compliant customers till December 31, which is in line with the cut-off date for exchanging demonetised currency. However, the non-KYC compliant Paytm customers will be able to transfer the money to their accounts with 1% transaction fee. It must be noted that there are no charges for transferring money between Paytm wallets.
Earlier, both the companies charged 4 percent for a non-KYC compliant user with waiting period of 45 days after creating their account before they could send money to a bank account. While, the KYC compliant users had to pay 1% fee without any waiting period to send money to their bank accounts.
The field of digital wallets in India have seen a sharp rise in number of active users immediately after the announcement of demonetisation of currency. This is a high-time for such companies to attract more and more customers by giving them lucrative offers. It will be interesting to see which digital-wallet company comes out at top, amidst the cash crisis.