Snapdeal’s digital payments platform FreeCharge named ex-Airtel Money executive Anshul Kheterpal as chief financial officer on Thursday.
The company has said that Khetarpal will help craft strategies for the payments business at FreeCharge and Snapdeal and closely work with the senior leadership teams to strengthen the digital payments business.
Prior to his FreeCharge appointment, Kheterpal was CFO and principal officer for Airtel Money and has over 8 years of work experience across finance, strategy, operations and treasury, as well as, in-depth experience across mobile commerce, digital payments and the telecom sector.
This is FreeCharge’s second high-profile appointment in the past few month. In September, the Bengaluru-based company had announced that it had hired Sudeep Tandon as chief business officer. Tandon had worked with consulting firm Cartesian and Samsung before taking on this role.
The company’s CEO and co-founder, Kunal Shah, said, “With FreeCharge’s aim to be the digital OS for the payments business in India, Anshul joining us will further strengthen our senior leadership team. With his years of experience in managing the complex business of payments coupled with his rich industry knowledge, he will help build the most innovative digital payments platform for our customers.”
FreeCharge currently claims to have 30 million registered users with its September launched Wallet having over 10 million. Snapdeal had acquired FreeCharge for $450 million in April and according to reports is in the process negotiating a new round of funding for the digital payments platform worth $300 million from the likes of Foxconn and SoftBank.
Speaking about his new role, Kheterpal said, “I am excited to join FreeCharge at a time when the payments industry is abuzz with new ways of creating digital transaction processes for customers.”
The company says that it hopes to reach 35 million wallets by March 2016 and is planning to expand into a number of new payments services over the next few months with new merchant products.
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Simar Singh is one of the youngest members of the BW team. A fresh graduate from IIMC, she also holds a degree in political science from LSR. She enjoys covering power, startups, lifestyle and a little bit of tech.
