Mukesh Ambani and Reliance Jio announce services to support transition to a cashless economy

Reliance Industries Limited Chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani, as part of his Jio related announcements yesterday said that Jio crossed fifty million customers in 83 days. Jio has become the fastest growing technology company in the history of the world. Ambani went on to congratulate Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his demonetisation move, calling it a “bold and historic” decision. The demonetisation was a big push for India towards a cashless economy. Ambani said that the Jio Money Application is a commitment from the side of Jio towards making a smooth transition from a cash based economy to a cashless one. In order to allow for easy conversions of cash from physical to digital, and from digital to physical, Jio is using a link to the Adhaar card. Jio money is rapidly deploying micro ATMs at millions of touchpoints. Micro ATM s are small card reading devices used for distribution of cash without bulky machines that hold the money in trays. There are plans to launch a Digital Retail Ecosystem, called Jio Money Merchant Solutions. The ecosystem will allow digital transactions of various types, including small businesses, vegetable vendors, public transport services, and person to person transactions. The Jio Money Merchant application will be available from 5 December. The accepted payments are directly routed to the bank accounts. The Merchant can make supplier payments, transfer money between multiple bank accounts, or use what Ambani calls “digital petty cash,” which is presumably money loaded into the wallet. The temporarily  relaxed guidelines for merchant accounts on digital wallets allow for Rs 50,000 to be transferred from a mobile wallet to the bank account every month. The extra features of directly transferring payments to banks, and transferring between accounts are extra features that will really help merchants. However, regular users will not be able to avail these facilities. Jio Money plans to sign up over small retailers in 17,000 towns and 400,000 villages. The number of merchants that Jio plans to get on board is massive. Jio Money aims to get 10 million small merchants on board in the next few weeks. By comparison, FreeCharge aims to get one million merchants to use its service over the course of the next year. Freecharge is aiming for 7 million transactions a day by end of 2016. Paytm hit 5 million transactions a day in mid November, and went past the 7 million transactions a day mark, a week later. Ambani re-iterated Jio’s commitment to support the demonetisation move by the Modi Government in every way it can. Disclaimer: Reliance Jio is owned by Reliance Industries, who also owns Network18, the publisher of Firstpost and tech2.