Freecharge, India’s digital payments platform has appointed Fareed Jawad as the Vice President and Principal Product Architect – Payments. Fareed was earlier working with Amazon India as Principal Product Architect where he was handling the core payment processing infrastructure for the company. Prior to Amazon, he was the Director – Product Management at Flipkart. He was in-charge of building the core payment processing infrastructure for Amazon.in among other businesses. Create Tier-1 processing infrastructure to keep up with the growth of the business. Provide architectural and technical guidance to various project teams. Help create payment assets that can leveraged globally for transaction processing. Provide the best customer experience possible within the guidelines of the regulatory regime.

At Freecharge, Fareed will be in charge of building the payments technology and also will lead the efforts on building technologies for solving the unique payments problems in India. 

On the appointment, Govind Rajan, COO, Freecharge said, “Fareed’s appointment reaffirms Freecharge's commitment to hiring the industry's best talent. We are on a cusp of a revolution to accelerate the FinTech capabilities in India. We look forward to Fareed’s contribution in strengthening our technical expertise and payments capabilities with his in-depth understanding of payments sector. Fareed will be responsible for developing products for customers and merchants both online and offline, in line with our vision to be the digital OS for the payments business in India.”

Fareed has always been in the payments industry right from Verifone in the US. He has also worked in Tata Communications, HCL Technologies, Moneris Solutions.

With over 30 million registered users, Freecharge allows its customers to make prepaid, post-paid, DTH and Electricity bill payments for numerous utility service providers in addition to leading online and offline merchants.

FreeCharge has been facing the fierce competition by its major rival Paytm which is funded by the Chinese giant Alibaba Group. FreeCharge, a digital payments platform was acquired by the E-Commerce giant Snapdeal for almost Rs 2,400 crore in 2015.

Freecharge has been focusing on expansion and recently partnered with BookMyShow, CCAvenue and Bhartiya Micro Credit (BMC). By partnering with BookMyShow, the company plans to offer the fastest and secure digital payments option. By using FreeCharge wallet, customers can now pay for movie, sports, plays and events in less than 10 seconds. The partnership with CCAvenue will enable FreeCharge customers to have access to real-time, multi-currency online payment service with around 1 lakh online merchants across various sectors. To further strengthen its position in the market and to reach out to more users, FreeCharge also partnered with an NGO called Bhartiya Micro Credit (BMC) which provides financial aid for e-rickshaws. E-Rickshaw drivers can now sign up on the newly launched service called Chat-n-Pay and get paid by the customers.