Freecharge appoints Fareed Jawad as VP-Payments

Freecharge, India’s leading digital payments platform, has appointed  Fareed Jawad as the Principal Product Architect and Vice President (VP) payments.
For this role, Fareed would be required to build payments technologies at Freecharge, and lead the efforts on building technologies for solving the unique payments problems that India faces.
Before this, Fareed was serving as Principal Product Architect at Amazon India, building the core payment processing infrastructure as a part of his role. Prior to that, he has worked with Flipkart as Director – Product Management and was also a part of the core team that launched PayZippy.
Fareed has had a long stint in the payments industry, being associated with it right from the earliest payment gateways with VeriFone in the US. His career path also included stints with large payment processors like Moneris Solutions in Canada and eFunds/FIS where he helped enhance the acceptance and issuance platforms for Chip Card processing.
Freecharge is on a mission to build the world-class payments ecosystem for merchants and customers. The company seeks to work collaboratively with various innovators and emerging FinTech players to implement the most reliable and frictionless payment method and Fareed will be instrumental in driving this with the senior leadership team at Freecharge.
BRAND HISTORY
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 over 30 million registered users and is PCI DSS compliant for information security.
FreeCharge was started in August, 2010 by Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon. After getting seed funding of an undisclosed amount from Tandon Group and Sequoia Capital in 2010, the company secured Series A funding of Rs 200 million from Sequoia Capital in 2011. In November 2012, the company claimed to be doing online recharge of INR 6 million on a daily basis, translating to INR 2.19 billion a year.
In 2011, FreeCharge was named one of the most promising technology startups from India by Pluggd.in.
On 1 September, 2014 Freecharge received $33Million Series B Funding from Sequoia Capital, Sofina and Ru-Net. One of the biggest fund raising by an Indian Technology Startup. On 6 February, 2015, FreeCharge further raised $80Million from Hong Kong-based fund Tybourne Capital Management and SF-based fund Valiant Capital Management and existing investors.
FreeCharge is building an advertising platform that will capture online and offline purchase behavior and brand preferences of consumers, by offering incentives and discount coupons to users to transact on its platform.
On 8 April, 2015 Indian e-commerce Snapdeal acquired Freecharge for Rs 2800 crore.