Ola, ICICI Bank sign MoU to bring co-branded credit cards, instant small-ticket digital credit and other offerings
Ola, the popular mobility platform, and ICICI Bank, the country's largest private sector bank by consolidated assets, announced on Tuesday that they had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to bring forth a range of integrated offers to their customers and driver partners. Through this alliance, two brands will bring together their respective technology platforms to offer the following facilities.
Bhavish Aggarwal, Co-Founder and CEO of Ola, believes that mobility and banking, both play a key role in fostering inclusive growth and creating lasting development benefits. So, he sees this alliance providing increased convenience to customers on both the platforms, as well as hundreds of thousands of driver partners. He said in a statement,
From API integration, to launching new products and solutions tailored to suit our common pool of millions of customers, the two brands will capitalise on each other’s strengths to deliver superior experience and enable smart, sustainable and inclusive mobility for India.
The four facilities include-
1) Ola booking facility on ICICI Bank’s mobile banking platforms
This integration will enable ICICI Bank customers to book an Ola and pay the fare by using the bank’s mobile banking applications; ‘iMobile’ and ‘Pockets’. Ola has similar integrations with players like Practo and Zomato.
2) Access to instant small ticket digital credit-
The facility will help Ola customers get small ticket digital credit instantaneously from ICICI Bank, on the Ola Platform. The digital credit will be available on the basis of a real-time credit assessment algorithm created by the bank. Ola already offers a similar solution to some customers based on their ride frequency.
The bank will instantly ascertain the creditworthiness of a customer and extend digital credit within a few seconds. Based on an intelligent combination of financial and digital behaviour patterns like ride frequency and amount among others, the entire process will be completely digital, without requiring any paperwork.
3) Enable digital payments to driver partners
ICICI Bank will offer a ‘Pay Direct’ card for Ola’s driver partners. With this, Ola’s auto and cab driver partners will be able to get their daily earnings directly into their ‘Pay Direct’ card accounts. Additionally, driver partners will also be able to swipe this card at merchant outlets for their purchases.
4) Co-branded credit card
ICICI Bank will launch a new co-branded credit card in association with Ola. With this card, customers will be able to avail benefits and exclusive offers such as cashbacks and accelerated reward points.
On the global front Uber too has worked on providing similar offerings. In October 2017, Uber had announced partnerships with Visa and Barclay's Bank to offer co-branded credit cards offering cashbacks and other benefits. Uber India doesn't have similar integrations or partnerships, yet.
Talking about their collaboration with Ola, Anup Bagchi, Executive Director, ICICI Bank said in a statement,
These new propositions will help Ola driver partners to manage their finances in a better way, while also enable Ola customers to get easy access to instant credit in a simple and secured manner. Furthermore, ICICI Bank customers will get the dual benefit of booking a cab and making payments directly through their ‘iMobile’ and ‘Pockets’ application....We will continue the model of co-creating to deliver innovative products and services to our customers.
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