Amazon Pay, the financial services arm of Amazon India launched its digital gold investment feature –‘Gold Vault’, for users. It has partnered with SafeGold for this offering and will allow users to buy digital gold for as little as Rs.5, revealed the e-Commerce behemoth of India. With this, Amazon Pay, now competes with other digital payment firms including, Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay, MobiKwik, Axis Bank-owned Freecharge and the likes of others, which have also been ramping their digital gold offerings.

“We believe in innovating on behalf of our customers to create newer experiences for them. As part of this commitment, we are constantly evaluating new areas and opportunities to connect with and serve our customers. This has led to Amazon Pay launching digital gold services in partnership with SafeGold,” says an Amazon spokesperson. Through this offering, Amazon customers will also have the freedom to buy and sell the amount of gold at any time with competitive pricing and without any hassle of renting a locker for safety.

Paytm and PhonePe had both launched digital gold offerings on its platform in 2017, while MobiKwik launched the offering in 2018, and Google Pay finally allowed users to invest in digital gold in April 2019.
Even Xiaomi, in April, introduced digital gold on its payments platform, MiPay.

Amazon Pay has partnered with SafeGold for this offering and will allow users to buy digital gold for as little as Rs.5

Recently, Mint reported that during the lockdown, payment firms were pushing their digital gold offerings, to boost transactions on their platform, and leveraged festivities around Akshaya Tritiya, to enable users to buy digital gold. For Akshaya Tritiya alone, Paytm claimed to have sold a little over 37 kgs of digital gold on its platform. While Bengaluru-based PhonePe claimed to have sold over 100 kgs of gold digitally, in the first four months of 2020.

Lately, Amazon Pay has been ramping up its financial services offering in the market. It associated with insurtech platform, Acko General Insurance Ltd to offer insurance for two-as well as four-wheelers, in the market. While Amazon faces tough competition from Google Pay, even messaging giant WhatsApp has been eyeing opportunities at the Indian financial services market. However, it is still slated to receive approval for its payment service WhatsApp Pay, which it has been running in closed-pilots for almost two years.

Abhijit Bose, WhatsApp’s India Head recently disclosed that the company will launch ‘many experiments’, some of which are already set in motion, in areas of digital banking, increased financial services and digitization of small businesses.