<article>On Wednesday, two of India’s top mobile wallet companies took to their companies’ respective blog pages to fire barbs at each other.</article>

On Wednesday, two of India’s top mobile wallet companies took to their companies’ respective blog pages to fire barbs at each other.
<a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.dealstreetasia.com/?s=mobikwik">MobiKwik </a>(run by One Mobikwik Systems Pvt Ltd), which has raised $87 million in venture funding so far, took issue with Nielsen’s Informate Mobile Insights Report that referred to mobile wallets in India.
In the report, Nielsen said that <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.dealstreetasia.com/?s=paytm">Paytm </a>was the most popular wallet in India, followed by <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.dealstreetasia.com/?s=freecharge">Freecharge</a>, the payments arm of e-commerce firm Snapdeal, and placed MobiKwik third.
MobiKwik had multiple issues with this, the first being that the sample size Nielsen used, 6,000, wasn’t large enough “for a burgeoning country” like India.
“Even the timeframe of this is questionable. For this particular comparison, Nielsen took timeframe for the data point between May–July 2015 while Freecharge wallet was officially launched in Sep’15. Isn’t it baffling that such a so called research institution will make this blunder?” questioned the post.
The Freecharge wallet was launched in September, but existed as a recharge app before that.
Thirdly, it said the research was not independent and was paid for.
MobiKwik also posted screenshots of e-mails it had gotten from Nielsen.
“Freecharge had taken a part of our data (from a custom track we do for them) and used it in their blog/press notes without checking with us or seeking claims,” said an e-mail from Nielsen to MobiKwik.
In response, Freecharge published a post titled ‘Don’t shoot the messenger when the message stings!’
“Realisation has recently dawned upon our friends at MobiKwik that the new kid on the block has overtaken them. And what do they do? No, it’s not introspection or course correction. No attempt to rise up themselves. Instead, they choose to try and pull down the climbers,” said Freecharge in the post.
Freecharge countered MobiKwik’s claim that the research was paid for and said that it was a syndicated report and also suggested MobiKwik take a primer on statistics as 6,000 was a “a very robust sample size by any standard.”
“The blog is a wake up call for the fin-tech industry in India and unveils the truth behind research reports. The facts are out for the fin-tech and start-up ecosystem to interpret and decide,” said a MobiKwik spokesperson.
Payments are a crucial part of Internet companies in India, and have become essential to the strategies of companies like Snapdeal and Flipkart. Last year, Snapdeal acquired FreeCharge for $450 million, and Ola (run by ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd) launched its own wallet for use across e-commerce platforms.
These compete with start-ups such as MobiKwik, Oxigen, PayU, Citrus Pay, and Novopay which have raised significant funding to help make digital payments easier.
According to the Nielsen report, the most popular mobile payment apps are those that provide services over and above pure payments, like mobile recharging, booking movie tickets, shopping and so on, which is where companies like Paytm and e-commerce platforms have an edge over those that just provide the utility of a wallet.
MobiKwik took an issue with this too – that the report only counted time spent in an app as a metric for highest usage&#8211; and said that “this methodology suited only one company which had a handful of merchants in total.”
Nielsen said mobile Insights employs “state of the art metering technologies to passively measure the actual usage of apps and sites on smartphones, versus conducting a survey.”
“In India, we operate a 6000 member Android smartphone users’ panel, that is representative of the connected Android user base in urban India. In this case, our findings cover the usage of mobile payment apps, and not instances where these services have been integrated into other apps or systems,” a Nielsen spokesperson said in an e-mail.
Also read:
<a style="color: #ff0000;" href="http://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/flipkart-launches-mobile-wallet-to-take-on-paytm-others-33018/">Flipkart launches mobile wallet to take on Alibaba-backed Paytm, Snapdeal’s Freecharge</a>
<a style="color: #ff0000;" href="http://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/india-freecharge-appoints-former-airtel-money-exec-anshul-kheterpal-as-its-cfo-23074/"> FreeCharge appoints former Airtel Money exec Anshul Kheterpal as its CFO</a>
This story was first published on <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.livemint.com/Companies/MOQpX1gg1D9UJJhqxVwyeP/Freecharge-and-MobiKwik-take-the-fight-to-their-blogs-as-wel.html">Livemint</a>

Two of India’s top mobile wallet companies took to their companies’ respective blog pages to fire barbs at each other.

India: Freecharge, MobiKwik take the fight to their blogs

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India: Freecharge, MobiKwik take the fight to their blogs

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