MobiKwik Lite Steps Up Its Bid Against PayTM With New Functionality

With paper cash ban still in play, India’s MobiKwik pushes on PayTM with new level of functionality.

The ban on larger-denomination bills in India has left the country in a bit of a panic, with reports of chaos and long bank lines emerging almost daily. Stories of protests and even some riots are hitting, and some are looking to mobile payment systems to help save the day. MobiKwik is one of the biggest such mobile operations in the country, and recently, it stepped up its own offering with MobiKwik Lite.

MobiKwik Lite, reports note, has the unusual advantage of being able to work on a feature phone just as readily as it will a smartphone. Plus, Lite even offers specific compatibility with slower-running networks like Edge and the local Hindi networks.

This works well in both directions; while there’s no doubt that India is the biggest smartphone growth market on Earth, most Indians are still actively using feature phones, and with MobiKwik Lite, these users can be brought into the fold.

In fact, MobiKwik Lite will run on any Android phone that’s running at least Gingerbread, and given that Gingerbread was released back in 2010, it’s a safe bet that most any working Android device in the country can handle MobiKwik Lite. The functionality has been toned down a bit to include bank-bound money transfers, exchanges on a peer-to-peer basis, and online bill payment along with recharges.

What MobiKwik has done here, and it’s likely something a lot of other firms are looking into or plan to do already, is open up the pool of potential users by a staggering degree. Given that mobile payments here are a great way to funnel those large-denomination bills into something more useful rapidly enough that the value isn’t lost altogether, it’s attractive to users.

The users, however, need something that will work where they go and will allow that value to not only be preserved, but also used, and MobiKwik Lite allows for preserved value by making the large bills usable again, if only after a fashion.

This move should give MobiKwik plenty of added value in the field, and make it an even more competitive fighter against dominant PayTM. We may well see a shift in attitudes in the region soon, at PayTM’s expense.