Freecharge hires former Amazon executive as VP of payments

Snapdeal controlled digital payments platform Freecharge has roped in former Amazon India executive Fareed Jawad as vice president of payments and principal product architect.

At Amazon, Jawad was the principal product architect, responsible for building the core payment processing infrastructure for the organisation. Before joining Amazon, he was director of product management at Flipkart and was part of the core team that launched PayZippy.

In his new role, Jawad will focus on building payments technologies at Freecharge.

"We look forward to Fareed's contribution in strengthening our technical expertise and payments capabilities with his in-depth understanding of payments sector," said Govind Rajan, COO, Freecharge in a statement. "He will be responsible for developing products for customers and merchants both online and offline, in line with our vision to be the digital OS for the payments business in India."

Jawad's experience in the payments industry spans more than a decade. He worked at VeriFone - one of the earliest payment gateways - in the US from 1998 to 2000. He has also worked with large payment processors such as Moneris Solutions in Canada and eFunds/FIS where he helped enhance the acceptance and issuance platforms for chip card processing.

Jawad holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science Engineering from Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering, Bengaluru.

Freecharge was founded in 2010 by Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon and was acquired by Snapdeal in April 2015. The deal value has not been disclosed but media reports estimated it at $300-400 million.

In December 2015, the firm appointed former Airtel executive Anshul Kheterpal as its chief financial officer, and in September of the same year, it hired Sudeep Tandon as the chief business officer .