The highly focused mobile service of India, hike got fund from the Tencent in 2016, and presently it took a big step of emulating the Chinese company’ WeChat app, along with the release of online mobile payments. The release of Hike wallet not just shows the strong ambition of building the messaging platform, but it also means that Hike has surpassed WhatsApp, the messaging app which had dominated India for a long time.
Facebook owned WhatsApp is usually coy regarding the future up gradation and services, but the co-founder Brian Acton has stated in public about the plans of launching the digital payments in India, which is the largest market having more than 200 million users. Meanwhile, Hike was recently valued at the price of $1.4 billion. However, it is still not intending to mention the actual number of its users other than saying that it has more than 100 million registered accounts.
Hike released its 5.0 version recently, is now initiating out with bank-to-bank and peer-to-peer payment features, being an in-app wallet which is not independent of the bank account and is powered by the government of India – backed UPI payment service. Other than sending the cash to everyone, Hike has introduced the “blue packet” service which allows the users to gift digital money for the special events, like birthdays.
This option borrows highly from the traditional “hongbao” and WeChat in China. The payment service of WeChat in particular, expanded steadily in China via digitization of the custom gifted envelops of the cash around the Chinese new year, which can be sent through WeChat app.
According to the CEO of Hike, Kavin Bharti Mittal, the company has drawn inspiration for the users in China and is thinking about it going to make itself an extremely amazing app. The envelope service aided further in popularizing the WeChat in China, however, they also created the service of collecting the payment info for future without getting over pushed. For the relatives sending or receiving the cash, users were compelled strongly to provide the bank and card details for getting involved. This made priming them for other types of the financial services, like the point of sale payments, far convenient.
The company’s goal is to lay the basis for the future to come while putting a heavy focus on the social payments. The hike is intending to lay the basis for the payments, but this is just the initial step.
