Airtel Safe Pay launched by India’s Airtel Payments Bank

By Edil Corneille

Gurugram-based Airtel Payments Bank has launched ‘Airtel Safe Pay’, a safe mode for making digital payments, to protect Airtel customers from the growing incidents of online payment frauds.

With the security feature, customers making UPI or netbanking based payments through the payments bank, no longer have to worry about money leaving their accounts without their explicit consent.

The security feature leverages Airtel’s ‘telco exclusive’ strength of network intelligence to provide an additional layer of payment validation compared to the industry norm of two-factor authentication. This is said to offer the highest level of protection from potential frauds such as phishing, stolen credentials or passwords, and even phone cloning that catches customers unaware.

Anubrata Biswas, MD & CEO, Airtel Payments Bank says, “As digital payments become the norm, especially in the post-pandemic world, we also have to solve for the challenge of frauds that are growing rapidly. We are happy to leverage Airtel’s core telco strengths to bring to market this unique capability that ensures that our customers have full control over their transactions. This sets a new benchmark in the Indian digital payments space by making security paramount.”

Using the feature, customers of the payments bank can make secure digital payments across millions of merchants, online retailers and utilities, and even send money. Customers can open an account within a few minutes with a video call from the Airtel Thanks app and enjoy a range of benefits while they make fully secure digital payments.

Says Adarsh Nair, Chief Product Officer, Bharti Airtel: “Airtel Safe Pay is yet another innovation where our secure network and world-class digital platforms combine to solve a unique market problem. At Airtel, we are taking the lead in offering the most secure digital payments platforms to our users and making sure that the customer is always in control without a worry about rogue transactions.”

The feature is free of charge and can be activated through the Airtel Thanks app home screen or from the banking section in a few steps.