Airtel partners with E-commerce portals to promote Airtel Money aggressively

It appears that Airtel has partnered with E-Commerce sites to promote Airtel Money, its mobile wallet service. The complete list of E-Commerce sites and services it now supports can be found here. Airtel has also started aggressively promoting Airtel Money by informing its subscribers about various discounts it offers on partner sites if one uses Airtel Money as their mode of payment.

It isn’t surprising that Airtel is pushing Airtel Money aggressively. According to our sources, Airtel did a small scale testing back in September and now they are ready for full scale launch. For the launch, it appears that Airtel has partnered with a good number of services and is offering a good enough discounts to attract users. For example, it is offering 32% discount with Myntra.com, up to 88% discount on premium brands on bagittoday, among others. Among the services it has partnered with E-Commerce sites, recharge websites, DTH recharge sites, ISPs, electricity, water and insurance bill payments, among others. Note that, as of March 31, 2014 Airtel Money has a base of 1.7 million users in India, making it the largest Prepaid Payment Instruments services in India. Surprisingly, Airtel did not reveal the user base for Airtel Money for the quarter ended June 30, 2014.
Vodafone, Airtel’s competitor, also runs a mobile money service M-Pesa, which has 0.3 million users as of June 30, 2014. Vodafone too, like Airtel, is pushing hard to sign up its subscribers with M-Pesa. When I ported out my number from Loop Mobile to Vodafone couple of months ago, I was asked to fill forms to sign up for M-Pesa service without explaining the details of the service.