Oxigen Wallet launches social mobile wallet services

Digital payment services provider Oxigen Services India Pvt Ltd has launched 'Oxigen Wallet', which the company says is India's first social mobile wallet service.

The service will enable users to share money with their friends and family over social networks and messaging platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Google+ and Twitter.

Users will also be able to use their wallet to recharge their mobile phones, pay bills and shop across a large number of online merchants, the company said in a statement.

''Merging payments with social and mobile will change the way people pay for their everyday needs," says Pramod Saxena, founder, chairman and managing director,Oxigen Services.

"We will continue to evolve the service by adding more products and features, thereby creating an ecosystem for payments where you will no longer need multiple mobile apps for payments of different services. In other words, a single mobile app will meet all your payment needs and set money free, in its true senses,'' said .

By using the Oxigen Wallet service, which is now available through Apple Store and Google Play Store, users can send money to their friends. The receiver is not required to have a bank account. Personalising the transfer, users can also send photos, videos and audio and text messages along with their money.

Given the social nature of the service, it is expected to find high usage amongst the youth who go out for meals with their friends, split bills, send smaller but more frequent gifts to one another.

In addition, they can also use the service for their own mobile recharges, bill payments and for payments on merchant sites (for movie tickets, to book travel tickets, pay for pizza, get music and movie downloads, among others).

Oxigen says so far it has processed over 2 billion payment transactions exceeding Rs20,000 crore, through small retailers, modern retail chains and banking websites.

The firm processes nearly half a billion transactions annually and has already acquired 1.5 million mobile wallet accounts, clocking close to 1 million transactions a month.