Hughes sets up e-payment kiosks in India

NEW DELHI: Hughes Escorts Communications Limited (HECL) has launched its consumer services in India in the form of DirecWay fusion centers. The company has simultaneously joined hands with four service providers — Hutch, Standard Chartered, NDPL and Career Launcher - across verticals like telecom, banking utility and education sector.

"Customers walking into any DirecWay Fusion center will now be able to pay in real-time for their Hutch connection, make credit card payments to Standard Chartered bank as well as pay their monthly electricity bill to North Delhi Power Ltd (NDPL). In addition to this students will be able to take tutorials for classes 9 to 12, using this service," said, Partho Banerjee, President and CEO, HECL.

Hughes has already signed up 50 DirecWay Fusion centers across 15 most important cities in India. The company is targeting to set up 5000 such centers over the next three years. "Moving forward this will be a big opportunity for us and we are looking at generating revenues to the tune of Rs100 crore from this new venture over the next three years," he informed.

Each Fusion center would ideally have one bill payment machine, two business Internet surfing stations and one PC dedicated to education. "We are not expecting people to come for this center just for surfing. We are looking forward to business applications for Internet bandwidth. Here we would be charging around Rs60 per hour for our services. This charge would wary from service to service," Banerjee added.

"Services related to payment of bills and banking will drive DirecWay fusion in the bigger cities while the same growth will be driven by education related services in the smaller cities of the country. We are expecting that this concept will revolutionize the retail space to quite an extent and going forward we will encompass the entire gamut of services ranging from entertainment, travel ticketing, hotel reservations and e-governance on this platform," commented Banerjee.

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