FreeCharge, CCAvenue team up to give customers access to one lakh online merchants

FreeCharge has announced partnership with CCAvenue, a payment gateway. With this, FreeCharge customers will now have access to real-time, multi-currency online payment services along with one lakh online merchants across sectors like hospitality, retail, education, among others. Talking about the partnership, Govind Rajan, Chief Operating Officer, FreeCharge said, “We want to make FreeCharge wallet ubiquitous in both the online and offline space by creating an ecosystem of partnership. With CCAvenue, we will further strengthen our partner ecosystem and offer our customers a wider assortment of online merchants. Our endeavour is to build the payment OS for digital India and I am confident that alliances like this will help us move in the right direction.” Speaking of the partnership, Vishwas Patel, Chief Executive Officer, Avenues Group said, “Digital wallets have played their part in the ecosystem and consumers have adapted to its usage significantly. It complements CCAvenue’s efforts to transform the market from cash to cashless. CCAvenue operates on a simple tenet, ‘more options lead to more business’ and has always remained neutral by associating with third party wallets and not limited its services to a captive payment wallet of its own. This association would enable FreeCharge as a payment option for our 100000+ e-merchants, and FreeCharge’s aggressive marketing strategies would greatly benefit our merchants.” It has been focusing on expanding both offline and online merchant base. Freecharge also plans to strengthen its ecosystem of partnerships. Consumers use FreeCharge to make prepaid, postpaid, DTH and Electricity bill payments, in addition to online and offline merchants. FreeCharge claims it has over 30 million registered users, is PCI DSS compliant for information security and sees over 90 per cent of transactions originating from mobile. FreeCharge Go, the virtual card was launched in January 2016. Founded in 2001, CCAvenue is a payment gateway service provider offering real-time, multi-currency payment solutions to businesses in hospitality, education, online retail and other major industry verticals. Talking numbers CCAvenue says it powers over one lakh e-merchants by offering the largest bouquet of more than 300 payment options including six major credit cards, over 98 debit cards, Amex EzeClick, 55 Net Banking, 11 Prepaid Instruments (including the MobiKwik and Paytm wallets), two Mobile Payments and up to 9 Multi-Bank EMI options. Recently, it launched ‘CCAvenue Finance’, a financial assistance program that connects web merchants with trusted lenders in the industry to help them secure easy loans for organic growth of their business.