CHENNAI: Airtel Payments Bank, the first in the country to have started operations, threw down the gauntlet to its competitors with the announcement of an offer aimed at wooing new customers and attracting the millions of subscribers on the rolls of its parent firm. The bank is now offering one minute of talk time free on the Airtel telecom network for every rupee deposited in the payments bank.
According to the firm, the offer will be applicable on first time deposits only. “Any customer opening a savings account with Airtel Payments Bank, will get one minute of talk time on his/her Airtel mobile for every rupee deposited,” the company said in a statement. For example, if a customer opens an account with a deposit of `1,000, then the person will get 1,000 minutes of free talk time on his or her Airtel mobile number. The talk time can be used for calling all over India, Airtel stated.
The move is the first one that directly links benefits in the telecom industry with deposits made in the banking system and works on leveraging the inherent strengths of the payment bank’s parent group.
“We are leveraging Airtel’s telecom ecosystem to bring banking services to the doorsteps of every Indian… We are also undertaking a massive drive to enroll over one lakh merchants in Rajasthan by the year-end, who will not be charged anything for accepting digital payments from Airtel Payments Bank customers,” Airtel Payments Bank CEO Shashi Arora said. He also pointed out that the company believes this will boost the digital payments ecosystem hugely and reduce dependence on cash.
Airtel’s introduction of an offer that directly links banking with telecom services could result in competitors in the Payments Bank space with telecom infrastructure following suit. Among the players that the Reserve Bank has given payments bank licences to are fellow telecom majors like Vodafone and Reliance Industries, which own sector disruptor Jio.
Experts point out that there is no reason that these two could not introduce similar offers that will effectively lock subscribers into their own ecosystems and simultaneously increasing their revenues from their banking ventures by utilising their telecom customer base.