The e-commerce giant, Amazon.com Inc has added insurance and even gold to its menu of financial services in India, to expand its customer base and attract more subscribers to its Prime loyalty programme for better market growth. The ramps up offered by the website increase the competition as financial technology (fin-tech) rivals and their deep-pocketed foreign backers struggle for profitability in a predominantly cash-based economy where millions of adults do not have their bank accounts. To enhance online payments, Amazon launched its Amazon Pay digital wallet in 2016. Since introduced a credit card, it has signed up to a state-backed payments network and processes payments for different gateways such as movies, flight tickets, telephone and utility bills. Auto insurance began offering in July and in August gold investment products. These both the financial services are offering first in Amazon. However, in India where it has over 100 million registered users, Amazon is better placed to use financial services to win subscribers to its annual $13 Prime plan which offers faster delivering of products and music and video streaming, tech executives said. To that end, the company aspires to make Amazon Pay the country’s payment method of choice, said Mahendra Nerurkar, head of Amazon Pay in India, which has signed up 4 million merchants. 

“Apparently Chinese fashion designers are leaving the back pockets off jeans because no one uses them anymore (for wallets). We would love to make that happen in India,” Nerurkar said.