Wise Payments Ltd. intends to begin signing up new clients in India for global remittances following a pause. This will be done to potentially acquire a larger share of a market that’s reportedly grown to $32 billion.
The London-headquartered Fintech has stopped taking additional clients in recently so that it could update its infrastructure after obtaining a license from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) that allows the app’s users to send more funds abroad.
Wise intends to resume signing up more clients in the coming months, noted Shrawan Saraogi, the APAC head of expansion at Wise.
In statements shared with Bloomberg, they said:
“India is a huge market for remittance. We will be primarily focusing on cross-border movement that’s currently almost entirely done by banks.”
Large lenders such as ICICI Bank Ltd. and State Bank of India have been leading the charge when it comes to the evolving remittances market in India, supported by tight capital controls, dated global payment channels as well as hefty taxes that have minimized the overall impact of fintechs.
Indians have remitted around $32 billion to other nations during the past year (up to March 2024), up considerably from $27 billion a year back, RBI data reveals.
Payments have been made mainly for travel purproses, educational requirements as well as family-related expenditures.
Wise has reportedly supported outgoing transactions from India since 2020 through a bank collab. However, the service had been subject to a limit of up to $5,000 per transfer, which does not apply anymore, a represented noted.
Prior to onboarding first-time customers under the updated guidelines, Wise is enhancing its back-end processes to adhere to tax and reporting rules among other modifications as required by the Authorized Dealer 2 license, the rep confirmed.
Companies need to undergo “multiple rounds of securing licenses for every area” of virtual banking products in India, explained Charlie Short, head of growth in the Asia-Pacific region at Revolut.
The firm reportedly has a waiting list of 200,000 clients and intends to introduce its local and global payment options in India shortly, Short said.
For Wise, APAC has contributed around 20% of its total earnings in the financial year ended March 2024.
Wise, which is currently serving several markets in the APAC region, reportedly charges an average fee of 65 basis points internationally.
Saraogi shared:
“We think we can be a pretty meaningful player in that market because we will launch a product that will be fast, that will be cheap, that will be transparent.”
