Playing its part in red hot payment wallets business in India, Amazon has further invested ₹67 crores in its wallet business. According to the documents filed with RoC (Registrar of Companies), the investment has come from Amazon’s Singapore unit, Amazon Capital Holdings and Amazon.com Inc. Ltd, Mauritius. Out of the total investment, over 99% has come from the Singapore unit. With this development, Amazon Online Distribution Services Pvt. Ltd has been renamed and rebranded to Amazon Pay (India) Pvt. Ltd.
Amazon has got an approval to operate its payment wallet by RBI in March 2017. At the time of getting approval, Sriram Jagannathan, Vice President – Payments, Amazon India had stated that Amazon was working to provide a reliable and trusted payment option to customers in India. With the approval from RBI, this had become a reality.
In December 2014, Amazon had invested ₹65 crores in Bangalore based QwikCilver Solutions. QuikCilver is an online gift-card provider, which used to provide gift cards to be used on Amazon. This step could be termed as the first step of Amazon setting its foot in India’s online payment market. Currently, QuikCilver has been merged with Amazon Pay’s India business.
In February 2016, Amazon hired Sriram Jagannathan from Citibank to head its payment business. The following month, it acquired Noida baed EMVANTAGE payments, which worked in the same domain. The same month, Amazon had applied for semi-closed wallet licence, which was issued by RBI in February 2017.
It launched Amazon Pay Balance in December 2016, which worked similar to wallets, however, the use of funds loaded on it was limited only to transactions on Amazon.