UK-based Revolut, one of the largest fintechs across the world and valued at $45 billion, is preparing to enter the Indian market with wallets that would facilitate both forex and domestic payments through prepaid cards and UPI. The launch is expected to be in the second-half of 2025.
“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,” said Paroma Chatterjee, CEO of Revolut India, in an interaction with FE.
Tiger Global-backed Revolut had set up shop in India in 2021 and received an in-principle approval for Prepaid Payment Instrument (PPI) licence earlier this year. “We’re one of the only three foreign companies have been given a PPI licence,” Chatterjee noted.
“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,” she added.
While Revolut has over 45 million customers globally and enjoys a decent market share in its home-base, in India the company will have to compete with a host of pre-paid and forex card providers such as Niyo, which offers co-branded debit and credit cards with zero charges for forex payments.
“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. 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 UK and Europe,” Chatterjee said.
In India, overall transaction volume through pre-paid payments instruments (wallets and cards) was less than 5% of total digital payments made in FY24, as per RBI data. Even the share of international payments made through prepaid instruments is only 12% of the total international payments volume recorded in September.
When seen in terms of transaction value, the share of pre-paid instruments is even lower. About 0.12% of the total digital payments in value came from prepaid cards and wallets.
As for pre-paid cards, the penetration has been historically lower than debit cards in India, with about 395 million cards issued as of September, compared to 990 million debit cards. In FY24, pre-paid cards constituted about 20% of the total prepaid payments volume in India.
Before Revolut, US-based fintech giant Stripe had entered India in 2016, and received the final nod for its payment aggregator licence in January this year. However, Stripe pulled back services in India earlier this year as a result of strict KYC norms for domestic payment aggregators and moved to an “invite-only” model for new account openings. The company later said it will build the required infrastructure to support more users in India by the second half of next year.