National, 7th December , 2016: FreeCharge, India’s fastest growing digital payments platform,has partnered with International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of World Bank Group, to help women entrepreneurs sell their products on Snapdeal, a business-to-consumer online marketplace.This partnership will support start-ups and early-stage women entrepreneurs to join the ecommerce platform for the first time.
FreeCharge and IFC will work together to promote women entrepreneurship and improve their financial accessthrough technology and digital payments. The program will also address their non-financial needs through skills and capacity building.
Govind Rajan, CEO, FreeCharge said, “We want to make FreeCharge wallets ubiquitous in both the online and offline space by creating an ecosystem of partnerships. By enabling women entrepreneurs online, FreeCharge wants to promote the digital payments landscape. Offering financial products on the basis of seller digital transaction histories and digital footprints reduces manual intervention in providing access to finance to these sellers.This partnership with IFC, with its global experience,will help us achieve our aim of becoming India’s leading digital payment operating system,while creating value and a market for women entrepreneurs.”
The ultimate goal of the program is to develop data-driven insights and viable demonstration models to understand the journey of women entrepreneurs on ecommerce platforms. This will help develop a pilot program to address the factors hindering women entrepreneurs from selling online and accepting digital payments.
“With the current demonetization move, digital payment platforms such as FreeChargeoffer massive convenience to entrepreneurs as well as consumers. Women—as entrepreneurs, employees, and suppliers—could leadby demonstrating that change to cashless transactions is only a matter of access, skills, and thinking differently,” said Andrew McCartney, Principal Operations Officer, IFC. “In fact, cashless transactions could pave the way for higher participation of women as entrepreneurs who typically shoulder multiple responsibilities and for whom time is always scarce. Digital payments could be the defining tool for their empowerment as contributors to India’s growing online retail industry.”
With various services on its platform, FreeCharge is fast becoming the most preferred digital payment platform in the country.FreeCharge is now accepted by both online and offline segments. It is convenient for consumers and will enable them to easily move from cash to digital payments.
About FreeCharge:
FreeCharge is India’s fastest growing digital payments platform. Consumers across the country use FreeCharge to make prepaid, post-paid, DTH and Electricity bill payments for numerous utility service providers in addition to leading online and offline merchants. FreeCharge is PCI DSS compliant for information security and is at the forefront of the mobile commerce revolution with over 90 per cent of transactions originating from mobile. FreeCharge Go, the virtual card was launched in January 2016, making FreeCharge wallet the universally accepted wallet in India.
