Amazon payments arm hires Flipkart’s former head of financial services

Online retailer Amazon India has hired the former head of financial services at main rival Flipkart to expand its payments business, a media report said.

Mayank Jain will focus on strategic new initiatives of Amazon Pay, an online payments processing service, The Economic Times reported, citing an Amazon spokesperson.

Jain was most recently the head of strategy at non-banking financial company Bajaj Finance Ltd, which he joined in September 2017, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He had joined Flipkart as the head of corporate strategy in 2013 and headed its financial services unit from January to July 2017. At Flipkart, he was responsible for launching initiatives such as ‘Buy Now Pay Later’, no-cost EMIs, and debit-card EMIs, the report said.

An IIM-Bangalore alumnus, Jain was also responsible for product development, modelling, operations and business development. Before Flipkart, he held senior posts at consultancies Boston Consulting Group and Sapient Corporation.

Email queries to Amazon did not get a response till the time of filing this article.

The appointment comes at a time when Amazon has been aggressively expanding its online payments arm. Late last year, Amazon had injected $245 million (Rs 1,600 crore) into its payments arm.

Besides being promoted as an in-house payments platform, Amazon Pay has also been rolled out across more than 20 third-party platforms including Yatra, FreshMenu, Faasos, Abhibus, Amar Chitra Katha, Café Coffee Day, Urban Ladder and Byju's.

In a recent interaction with TechCircle, Amazon India head Amit Agarwal had said the company was working with several banks to improve the success rate of transactions on Amazon.

In a recent initiative primarily aimed at Tier-II cities and towns, Amazon launched doorstep services to allow customers to top up their Amazon Pay wallets with cash from their homes.

“We found that a lot of customers we are acquiring are primarily cash customers coming into the digital load. That is why we launched this notion of cash load at doorstep... This feature has done exceedingly well over the last six months and this is helping in our Tier-II and Tier-III centres’ strategy play as well,” Agarwal said in the recent interaction.