Hike partners with Airtel Payment Bank

Indian instant messaging app Hike has announced its partnership with Airtel Payments Bank to power its Wallet.

Through this partnership, Airtel Payments Bank gets access to over 100 million users on Hike and will begin powering the Hike Wallet product and Hike users will have access to Airtel Payments Bank's vast product line including merchant and utility payments, KYC infrastructure, which is one of the largest in the country, giving a big boost to the platform in light of the recent KYC guidelines announced by RBI.

Pathik Shah, VP, Product at Hike Messenger said, "We've seen tremendous traction on the Wallet over the last few months, most of it is organic. We're on track for 5M+ transactions this month with only a simple set of services such as Recharge & P2P. As we scale up the number of services on our platform in the coming months, we expect this to grow even faster."

"In light of the new KYC guidelines, we're also excited to announce a new partnership with Airtel Payments Bank. This is a great move for our users and it will ensure that they have an uninterrupted service when the new guidelines kick in. We're excited and we look forward to working with Airtel on supporting this effort to bring more Indians online and enable easy transactional services for them," he said.

A Ganesh, Chief Operating Officer, Airtel Payments Bank said, "We are delighted to partner with Hike to build a world-class digital payments ecosystem by leveraging our vast reach and digital banking infrastructure. The addition of Hike Wallets to our portfolio will position us as one of the largest digital payments platforms in India."

The hike was launched in 2012 and acquired a user base of over 100 million in January 2016. In August 2016, Hike raised its fourth round of funding of $ 175 million led by Tencent and Foxconn at a valuation of $1.4 billion, making it the fastest company in the India to attain a valuation of $ 1 billion, having reached the milestone in just 3.7 years.

Investors in Hike include Tencent, Foxconn, Tiger Global, Softbank, and Bharti. Apart from these, some of the top tech veterans from the Silicon Valley have also invested in the company and are advisors.