Amazon Pay India will continue to focus on voice-enabled payments in 2023, says Whole-Time Director Vikas Bansal.
“In 2023, our theme is about how we make payments even more fast and intuitive and frictionless. In that, one of our key things is that when you are paying for any of the use cases, the payment just works. Our focus is how to reduce the number of steps (that customers take), reduce failure rates, and make sure that the payment just works,” Bansal said.
“We want to continue to invest in voice enabled payments because we feel like voice enabled payments is the next frontier of payments where customers can just say to pay their bill and it just happens. That is an area where we continue to work and focus on.”
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As of now, Amazon Pay India’s customers can pay various utility bills through a voice-enabled payment system. The company is currently designing a plan to expand the areas in which the payment system can be used.
“We are still putting together a plan (on voice payments). But our endeavour is that everything you can do today by touching your phone on the application, we want to do it through voice-based payments. That is just an area of focus,” he said.
Apart from this, the company is also focusing on helping its merchants grow by providing loans, and by increasing the footfall to their stores.
Broadly, Bansal is eyeing developments in buy now pay later, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) lending, and Unified Payments Interface system going ahead.
“..I feel India is credit starved and the access to credit is really limited. We as an industry need to drive innovation to expand credit access. Once you expand the access to credit, you grow the economy, you grow the per capita income and it becomes a good positive flywheel,” he said.
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Last week, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) reportedly put licensing of the New Umbrella Entity (NUE) network on hold. The financial institution is seen as a rival to the National Payments Corporation of India. Six groupings, which included Facebook and Amazon among others, had applied for the licenses.
“We were one of the parties in the application process. We at Amazon Pay continue to invest and work on new products and services. We continue to be a fully compliant business and we follow all the RBI guidelines. We continue to watch the space and latch on to new opportunities as they come up. That is all I would say at this point.”