UK fintech Revolut is reportedly looking to expand its services to India having originally received a regulatory licence in 2021.
The digital bank, home to more than 45 million users globally, is preparing to enter the Indian market to help facilitate the growing appetite for digital payments that Indian customers have been embracing over the past several years.
According to the Financial Express, central to Revolut’s expansion will be to adopt and offer local Indian digital wallet and card providers such as Niyo, whilst also leveraging the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a payment rail that processed just under 79 billion in transactions in the first half of this year.
Speaking to the Financial Express, CEO of Revolut India, Paroma Chatterjee, said that not only will the facilitation of digital payments be a core goal for the company’s expansion into India, but also its forex services too.
She said: “Our vision is to bring the entire bouquet of Revolut’s products over time to India and localise them based on the unique context that India offers and the needs of the Indian market. The first area where we see that a need exists is the entire Forex space.
“Customers will be able to open the wallet, make Forex transactions through a card or remittances directly and make domestic transactions through a prepaid card and UPI through the same wallet. The entire journey of setting up a Revolut account is going to be digitised in just 12 steps.”
After acquiring a Prepaid Payment Instrument (PPI) licence in India back in 2021, this allowed Revolut to enable the transfer of funds via cash, bank transfers or credit cards onto its platform in the country.
PPI transactions in India have significantly increased amongst Indian customers, with INR 228bn generated across the Indian financial landscape this year alone. Statista forecasts that this number will jump to nearly INR 500bn by 2029.
There are services that Revolut can offer to help accommodate this surge, such as its competitive forex offerings that are applicable to INR. Issuance fees, float income and breakage also make up the total volume of Indian PPI transactions.
“Today you have an average 3-5% markup on every transaction whether it is loading money onto a card or trying to remit money and transfer money for any need overseas,” added Chatterjee.
“This is something that we are going to de-mark. We are going to be the most affordable forex player in the country, which has been our USP in the UK and Europe.
India represents one of the most lucrative financial markets in the world, not only for the runaway success of its UPI payment rail, but also because nearly 80% of all Indians use or have used a digital wallet.
If Revolut can expand its Revolut Card offerings and its digital banking app to a population of more than 1.4 billion, it could represent Revolut’s most successful market to date in terms of users.
India is not the only Asian country Revolut has eyes on expansion in. Last September, the UK fintech applied for licence applications to the Central Bank of UAE to become an Electronic Money Institution in key Emirati states such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
