Swiggy had earlier announced laying off 1,100 employees amid Covid impact.

Food delivery company Swiggy is looking to further ease payments for its customers even as demand for orders are expected to gradually come back amid relaxed Covid guidelines by the government. Now Swiggy users would be able to pay for their orders from the app’s own digital wallet — Swiggy Money as the company announced the launch of this new payment mode in tie-up with ICICI Bank on Tuesday. The wallet would allow customers to store money and pay for all food orders on the Swiggy app. Swiggy Money is powered by ICICI Bank’s ‘insta wallet service’ which is built on a cloud platform with API integration. While ICICI Bank customers using Swiggy can instantly start using the wallet, non-ICICI Bank customers will have to provide details of a government ID to ICICI Bank for using the wallet.

“This first-of-its-kind integration offers benefits such as higher scalability, improved performance, quick to market and high-speed processing for reconciliation among others,” Swiggy said in a statement. Using the wallet service, users would be able to avail instant refunds, top-up their wallet and make single click purchase without multiple authentications. However, if the order value exceeds the wallet balance, Swiggy will offer users a ‘split-pay’ option to pay rest of the amount through another payment source to complete the transaction.

“Providing the best payment and refunds experience is an integral move in tightening up the ordering experience and maintaining best-in-industry repeat rates on our platform that now offers multiple hyperlocal delivery services,” said Anand Agrawal, VP Products, Swiggy.

However, this isn’t the first offering that Swiggy and ICICI Bank together have come up with. “A year ago, we had customised an industry-first UPI led payment solution for Swiggy’s delivery partners to transfer funds. We had also introduced UPI-led instant one-click payment for millions of Swiggy’s customers,” said Bijith Bhaskar, Head- Digital Channels & Partnership, ICICI Bank.

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On the restaurant side, Swiggy had earlier this month launched multiple measures to handhold them. Part of a ‘Jumpstart Package’, Swiggy decided to offer safety kits needed for implementing hygiene protocols, and ‘business booster programs’ that “improve visibility and drive orders volumes at heavily subsidized rates,” the company said in a statement. Over 40,000 restaurants, according to Swiggy have already availed the package. Swiggy is also providing training content on the best practices to be followed at a restaurant along with packaging material and safety kits at up to 40 per cent discounts.

Impacted by Covid, both Zomato and Swiggy had announced reducing their operations including the workforce. While Zomato downsized its team with 13 per cent layoff, Swiggy had hinted towards shutting down or scaling down the cloud kitchen business and other “adjacent businesses that are either going to be highly volatile or will not be highly relevant for the next 18 months,” its co-founder Sriharsha Majety had hinted in a letter to employees in May. He had also announced laying off 1,100 employees. A majority of restaurants during lockdown had moved to online-only deliveries even as dining-out had taken a maximum hit. For both Swiggy and Zomato, the orders had reportedly fallen by over 50 per cent in April.