Truecaller dials Chillr to foray into digital payments

Phone number search engine Truecaller on Wednesday announced a strategic investment into the payments space in India by acquiring Chillr, the country’s first multi-bank payments app.

Truecaller co-founder and chief strategy officer Nami Zarringhalam said the founders of Chillr— Sony Joy, Anoop Sankar, Mohamed Galib and Lishoy Bhaskaran — will join Truecaller.

Sony Joywill be the vicepresident of Truecaller Pay.

Zarringhalam said the company intended to leverage its full reach of over 150 million users in India as well as its 300-plus existing partnerships in the country.

“By acquiring Chillr, we are reaffirming our commitment to mobile payments and strengthening our plans to raise its adoption amongst our user base,” Zarringhalam said.

He, however, did not disclose the amount paid and the terms and conditions for acquiring the Chillr, which was launched in 2014.

Truecaller has 65 employees in India.

Chillr co-founder Sony Joy said: “While ICICI partnership is already there with Truecaller, going forward we will have multiple bank partnerships also. We are doing a multi-bank model with UPI. So you will see lot more banks on the platform working closely with us.”

On the issue of privacy getting breached and wrong details fed into Truecaller’s system, Zarringhalam said: “What started to happen was that people started tagging other users. That was an issue. A couple of months back we rolled out the capabilities of users themselves being able to determine what their types were.”