Hike Messenger, as much as you might not know about it, is a big deal in India and it has over 100 million users registered.
On this day, Hike will go down in history as being the day the platform launched its mobile payments solution. Dubbed Hike Pay, the service has been introduced with the latest update Hike 5.0.
Hike Pay will offer peer-to-peer payments and free bank-to-bank payments as well. P2P payments will be made through Hike’s in-built wallet that is not dependent on a bank account while the bank-to-bank transfers will require users to have bank accounts and is powered by Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payment system which is backed by the Indian government.
Hike users will be able to use the Hike wallet to pay for postpaid airtime bills and also to buy pre-paid airtime from within the app. The company hower said that they are working on bringing more payment services to the platform.
Alongside the wallet, Hike introduced a new feature known as Blue Packets. Think of these as virtual gift cards that can be used to send monetary gifts to other Hike users in different occasions, say, birthdays or weddings.
Speaking to CNBC Hike’s Founder and CEO, Kavin Bharti Mittal said, “It’s one step further in our vision to make Hike a messaging platform that will change the way people interact with content and services.”
WhatsApp already revealed that they would be launching their own in-app payments service, but the fact that Hike beat them to it is a blow to them.
India is WhatsApp’s largest market and if the law of first-mover advantage is to take precedence, then WhatsApp is in for a big surprise.
