Amazon Gold Vault: E-commerce giant Amazon’s payment services arm Amazon Pay has come out with its latest feature, an option that allows customers to buy digital gold, Mint reported. In this hassle-free alternative to buying physical gold, people can invest as little as Rs 5 to buy the yellow metal via this digital option.
Amazon Pay has tied up with SafeGold, the retail brand of Digitial Gold India Pvt, to launch this Amazon Gold Vault service for users. SafeGold offers 24 carat gold of 995 purity (99.5 percent pure).
“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,” an Amazon spokesperson said.
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 Gurugram-based MobiKwik launched the offering in 2018, and Google Pay finally allowed users to invest in digital gold in April 2019.
Even Chinese electronics player Xiaomi,in April, introduced digital gold on its payments platform, MiPay.
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 partnered 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 said 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 soon.
