Revolut committed to invest US$45 million in India back in 2021, and we will be interested to see how far that goes. With Google Pay and Walmart-backed PhonePe dominant in domestic payments, we are not sure how regulators will perceive a foreign fintech with ambitious plans for the cross-border market.
The company previously talked up its expansion to India in 2021, but then nothing came of it until the recent approval to issue PPIs. We suspect the UK fintech giant got bogged down in the subcontinent’s complex regulatory environment. Revolut does not have a lot of experience in emerging markets, and is used to operating in markets like the UK, continental Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.
However, it seems Revolut is gaining confidence about its prospects in India. On Sept. 16, The Financial Times reported that the UK fintech unicorn is preparing to launch in the subcontinent next year. Revolut has reportedly testing products in-house among its more than 4,000 local staff and is on course to launch its app, domestic and multi-currency cards in India in 2025. “We’re actually very, very close, we’re literally down to single-digit bugs right now in the system,” Paroma Chatterjee, chief executive of Revolut India, told the Financial Times. “India is being treated as a critical expansion market.”
Revolut plans to submit an audit report to the RBI next month, with the intention of with the aim of getting full authorization after the tentative approval. Thereafter, in the India market Revolut will be “ blindly scale focused — we’re very profitability focused,” Chatterjee said.