 "Freecharge")
Digital payments company FreeCharge has announced its phenomenal performance in the fuel category within six months of the category launch.
The company has shared the value of transactions on FreeCharge for fuel purchases was enough for a tourist to take 200 trips round the earth on road.
FreeCharge had ventured into the fuel category with HPCL, starting with a pilot programme which now covers nearly 60 percent outlets of HPCL.
It had recently announced signing a pan-India arrangement with IOCL, HPCL and BPCL for deployment of its payment solution at their outlets. As a part of the tie-up, FreeCharge has already gone live at more than 10,000 outlets across nearly 1,000 cities in India.
FreeCharge is aiming to double this count by end of the month and cover all the 53,000 petrol pumps of the country at the earliest.
While consumers can use FreeCharge to pay for fuel at leading outlets across all the metros, the major win is in the activation of outlets in locations such as Assam, J&K, Pondicherry and other tier II and III cities as well. In order to make the payment at the outlet, a consumer just needs to enter his phone number and punch in the On-The-Go-Pin in the POS machine at the outlet to complete the transaction.
In the past six months alone, FreeCharge has seen enough transaction value to cover 8.2 million kms, which is nearly 200 times the circumference of our planet. Another interesting trend is that the average value of these transactions is close to Rs. 210-220, which shows habit building tendency for consumers.
"It's heartening to see so many consumer transactions in the first six months of the category. We are thrilled to be building cashless habits for frequent expenses like fuel. We are soon expanding our presence to thousands of petrol pumps across the country and see the trend going upward driven by our seamless experience," said CEO FreeCharge, Govind Rajan.
