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Revolut is preparing to launch its services in India next year, targeting tens of millions of the country’s top-tier consumers in a crucial test for the growth strategy of Europe’s most valuable fintech.
London-based Revolut set up in India in 2021 but did not receive in-principle approval from the country’s central bank to issue prepaid cards and wallets until earlier this year.
It has since been testing those 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 the world’s most populous nation 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 the bank’s Indian arm, told the Financial Times. “India is being treated as a critical expansion market.”
The fintech, which also holds an EU banking licence issued by authorities in Lithuania, is seeking to expand its revenues outside Europe, which accounted for more than 90 per cent of its sales in 2023.
Founded almost a decade ago by chief executive Nik Storonsky, a former Credit Suisse trader, Revolut received a long-awaited UK banking licence in July that it anticipates will ease approvals in critical markets such as the US. In August it secured a $45bn valuation and drew in investment from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, the FT reported last week.
The fintech is also seeking to expand in the Middle East and has applied for e-money and remittance licences with the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, according to a person familiar with the application.
Fintechs have proliferated in India, catering to millions of its growing middle class who previously had limited access to formal banking services.
That has been encouraged by New Delhi, which supported the development of the India stack, a government-backed interoperable digital infrastructure that means companies can build integrated apps providing access to services from welfare payments to loans.
However, the challenge for most Indian fintechs is “unit economics”, Chatterjee said, given India’s low GDP per capita estimated by the IMF at $2,730. The realistic size of the market for Revolut was “pretty much” the top 10-15 per cent of India’s 1.4bn population, “which is sizeable”, she said.
“That’s the segment that also consumes Netflix, that consumes your Apple products . . . that travels and travels internationally as well, what I term the global India,” Chatterjee said. “They have friends and family overseas, they’ve probably studied overseas, worked overseas and come back or vice versa.”
Chatterjee’s focus since joining Revolut three years ago had been to secure regulatory approvals and spearhead efforts to make its platform compliant with the country’s “fairly stringent data localisation norms”, she said.
Revolut will now submit an audit report to the Reserve Bank of India next month with the aim of getting full authorisation after the tentative approval. After that, Chatterjee said Revolut’s strategy for India was “not just blindly scale focused — we’re very profitability focused”.
The group reported a pre-tax profit of £438mn last year, up from a loss of £25mn in 2022.
“There will be a significant number of competitors in the market, all with a significant amount of funding,” Chatterjee added. “We will have to earn our right to win this market.”