Amazon digital payments business in India rises 64%

Ecommerce giant Amazon’s digital payments vertical in India, on Friday, reported a 64% rise in its yearly total revenue in a period preceded by successive Covid-19 lockdowns in the country.

Amazon Pay said its total revenue rose to Rs 1,370 crore in the financial year ended March 2020, from Rs 834.5 crore a year earlier, according to a regulatory filing.

Covid-19 lockdown and social distancing norms impacted the ability to onboard new offline merchants as well as perform in-person KYC for wallet customers, Amazon Pay said in the filing.

“Albeit this situation has accelerated development of new remote technology driven alternatives for these processes which we believe would both improve customer experience and reduce costs for the business,” Amazon Pay added.

The total loss in the period ballooned by 61% to Rs 1,868.6 crore.

The business unit’s total expenses grew to Rs 3,238.5 crore, up from Rs 1,995.3 crore a year ago.

Advertising and promotional charges, which accounted for the company’s largest expenditure grew 55% to Rs 1,423.8 crore.

The company, which opened up peer-to-peer payments via the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) through its wallet in April last year, has been incentivising customers through cashbacks for using the wallet to pay utility bills and book tickets for travel.

Amazon Pay is used by its customers in India for payment purposes that include shopping on 

Amazon.in, recharges and bill payments, money transfers, quick response (QR) code payments at offline merchants, and online payments at merchant websites and apps.

The payment service provider partners with banking, non-bank financial companies, fintech providers, and merchant partners to deliver its services.

In the reported period, Amazon Pay launched UPI for iOS users, launched a minimum KYC

pre-paid instrument (PPI) wallet, scaled adoption of its Amazon Pay ICICI credit card, operationalized the insurance corporate agency license, and launched new ticketing use cases of flights, buses and movies.

Read: Google Pay, PhonePe lead UPI market in Nov, drive 82% of transactions

Amazon Pay competes with Flipkart-owned PhonePe, Alibaba-backed Paytm, and Google Pay.

The Bengaluru-incorporated subsidiary’s latest infusion from two Amazon subsidiaries, in October, amounted to Rs 700.16 crore.