Big Idea

Oxigen Services

With a retail payments business that's profitable, Oxigen is hoping its consumer wallet business to break even soon

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Published 7 years ago on Apr 06, 2016 2 minutes Read

Launched in 2004, Oxigen has created a closed-wallet platform where consumers can pay cash for services at small shops, kirana stores and customer service centres in rural areas and big stores in urban areas. This money is then credited to the retailer’s wallet and can be used to make payments. Oxigen has 2 lakh retail access points at which 600 million transactions were done last year; this year, the figure will rise to 750 million. Oxigen’s PoS, a smartphone that relies on GPRS for internet connectivity and includes a biometric scanner that connects its back-end to the Aadhaar database, is now a banking and retail access point to buy insurance policies as well. Its wallet also supports prepaid Visa cards: on e-commerce sites that don’t accept wallets, customers can use the Oxygen prepaid Visa cards instead. The card can be topped up, reused or discarded and customers can generate as many as they wish.