Amazon Pay's Anuradha Aggarwal on how there's a real need for simplicity in digital payments

The digital payments sector is witnessing rapid growth, driven by factors such as technological advancements, changing consumer preferences, and increasing digitization. Convenience, security, and the availability of innovative features has led to customers embracing digital payment solutions.

There is a growing preference amongst consumers for convenience in payment methods. Customers are increasingly gravitating towards solutions that offer ease of use, quick transactions, and hassle-free experiences. Considering this, Amazon Pay had come out with 'Pay Karne Ka Smarter Way' featuring Ayushmann Khurrana highlighting the speed and convenience of Amazon Pay.

Anuradha Aggarwal, director, user growth and CMO, Amazon Pay India discusses with Storyboard18 about the genesis of the campaign, consumer insights that the digital payment service leveraged and more.

What led to the genesis of Pay Karne Ka Smarter Way campaign? What was the rationale behind choosing Ayushmann Khurrana?

We realized that customers are looking for convenient, secure, safe ways of making payments. And, it's not limited to just where they make payments or how they make payments, but across all touch points, across all payment instruments that they use, and across all use cases. Therefore, we decided to simplify bill payments for customers last year.

We gave them simpler and smarter ways to make payments last year. This year, we discovered that while customers are using digital payments extensively, they are still suffering some pain points when they are making payments. Take the case of low lighting for example when scans take time, or don't scan at all, in the case of many parking lots. Then there are grocery queues where people are impatient. In such cases, you need fast and secure solutions. Amazon Pay has this new feature called “auto torch”. We are the first ones on iOS to do an auto torch in low light, which allows us to pay even in low light area.

Customers tend to have anxiety about whether the money will get refunded, the time it will take for the refund and the person of contact to solve their query. This is a key differentiator for our Amazon Pay wallet where the customer can actually make payments in one click. They can get instant refunds and they can connect with our customer service 24/7. That's what we want to communicate and let the customer know that there are smarter ways of making payments out there.

Coming to why we chose Ayushmann as our partner for this campaign; it's due to his versatility which resonates with Amazon Pay’s versatility. He is not only charming and witty but also resonates with every other man. Amazon Pay being an accessible brand, we wanted to go for a celebrity who was not inaccessible.

What are some key consumer insights that you’ve been observing currently?

A lot of customers leave the house without their physical wallets, and the younger the customer, the more comfort there is around making a digital payment on any interface. Yet, not every customer realizes that there is interoperability and that they can scan with any QR code and they can receive money from any QR code in any app. This is one of the insights that we have used.

There is still some element of education that needs to be done, despite the fact that there is a huge amount of ubiquity of digital payments. Secondly, there is a proliferation of customer payment instruments and ways to pay; there's a real need for simplicity. And that is something that Amazon Pay is working very hard to solve for the customer.

We do realize that sometimes the choices can be overwhelming. Therefore, we want to simplify them; we want to put them in front of the customersaying here are the choices. They can simply make a choice between one instrument or the other basis what sorts of payment they want to make, or the rewards that they want to receive.

How is Amazon currently approaching advertising and marketing?

A lot of our communication is for our visitors who come to shop. Our shoppers and payers are the people we want to talk to. We communicate with potential customers even as we go outside of Amazon customer base and speak to customers about how Amazon Pay is still a smarter way to pay. We are fundamentally approaching the Amazon customer who wants to shop on Amazon.

We want to talk to customers who have fragmented their payment instruments across different apps; we want to encourage them about consolidating their payment instruments in one place. Ideally, we want customers to make payments for all their everyday payment use cases including bill payments, LPG cylinders, and mobile phone payments among others on Amazon Pay. We use a 360-degree approach for our mass media campaigns, but we do a lot of targeted communication to customers on the site itself.

How is Amazon innovating and evolving?

We constantly innovate, evolve, and improve our existing features while simultaneously working on more convenient payment solutions. We have enhanced our Scan & Pay feature with improved latency as well as enabling quick and seamless payments even in unfavorable environments including low light areas, low network areas. We have a miniscule payment failure record, even in such cases we facilitate instant refunds and enable 24X7 customer support for our users.

We are one of the first ones to launch the auto torch on iOS. We're also launching very large, diversified use cases; we just launched our Fastag proposition with ICICI bank which is connected straight to the Amazon Pay Wallet.

The customer doesn't have to keep uploading their details; they can connect the details with the Amazon Pay wallet, allow auto pay and continue to pay from there. We have also come up with travel tickets where customers can do seat selection along while booking air travel. People can book their flight tickets on Amazon and hotels when they travelling. Other than that, Amazon Pay is widely accepted at over 10,000 online merchants, covering a wide range of services including cabs, food delivery, movie ticketing, bus ticketing, and travel bookings including merchants like Uber, Zomato, Swiggy, Dominos, ACT, Red Bus, Faasos, BookMyShow, Freshmenu, NetMeds, and MakeMyTrip.