Hike Messenger, Airtel Payments Bank Collaborate on Digital Wallet

Indian instant messaging application Hike on Wednesday partnered with Airtel Payments Bank to power its digital payment wallet.

"We're on track of over five million transactions this month (November) from services such as recharge and P2P.

"We're excited and we look forward to working with Airtel on supporting this effort to bring more Indians online and enable easy transactional services for them," Pathik Shah, Vice President, Product, Hike Messenger, said in a statement.

As per the collaboration, Hike messenger users will have access to Airtel Payments Bank's merchant and utility payment services and KYC infrastructure.

The messaging platform has over 100 million registered users. It is growing by over 30 percent month-on-month (MoM).

"We are delighted to partner with Hike to build a world-class digital payments ecosystem by leveraging our digital banking infrastructure," said A. Ganesh, Chief Operating Officer, Airtel Payments Bank.

In September, Airtel Payments Bank integrated the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) on its digital platform that gave its users convenience of making secure digital payments to online/offline merchants and making instant money transfers to any bank account in India.

At present, Hike - a joint venture between Bharti Enterprises and SoftBank Corp - is handling over 10 billion messages and three billion stickers per month.