FreeCharge Partners CCAvenue; Expands Customer Access to Online Merchants

Snapdeal-owned digital payments platform FreeCharge has partnered with a payment gateway CCAvenue, giving its customers access to over 100,000 online merchants across sectors like hospitality, retail, and education.

It will also help them access real-time, multi-currency online payment services, FreeCharge said in a statement on Monday.

"We want to make FreeCharge wallet ubiquitous in both the online and offline space by creating an ecosystem of partnership. With CCAvenue, we will further strengthen our partner ecosystem and offer our customers a wider assortment of online merchants. Our endeavour is to build the payment OS for digital India and I am confident that alliances like this will help us move in the right direction," Govind Rajan, Chief Operating Officer, FreeCharge said.

Speaking of the partnership, Vishwas Patel, Chief Executive Officer, Avenues Group said, "Digital wallets have played their part in the ecosystem and consumers have adapted to its usage significantly. It complements CCAvenue's efforts to transform the market from cash to cashless. CCAvenue operates on a simple tenet, 'more options lead to more business' and has always remained neutral by associating with third party wallets and not limited its services to a captive payment wallet of its own. This association would enable FreeCharge as a payment option for our 100000+ e-merchants, and FreeCharge's aggressive marketing strategies would greatly benefit our merchants."

This association would allow CCAvenue e-merchants use FreeCharge as a payment option. FreeCharge directly competes with payment e-wallets like Alibaba-backed Paytm, and Flipkart's recently launched Flipkart Money.

Founded in 2001, CCAvenue is a payment gateway service provider offering real-time, multi-currency payment solutions to businesses in hospitality, education, online retail, and other major industry verticals.