Four years after setting up shop in India, UK-based fintech giant Revolut is finally making its domestic debut with a line-up of prepaid products that mark its entry into a key financial service market globally —one that it hopes would bring in another 20 million users.
The company, valued at $75 billion and backed by Tiger Global, is rolling out a UPI-integrated prepaid wallet, a domestic prepaid card, and a prepaid forex card on Visa, hoping to attract the aspirational youth as much as the credit-averse, with a credit-card-like rewards programme for prepaid cards.
Targeting the ‘Next 200 Million’
“We’re not chasing the top 5 million Indians who already have high-end credit cards and private banking, rather, our focus is the next 150-200 million, who might own a credit card but want more from it, like better travel and dining experiences,” Paroma Chatterjee, CEO of Revolut India, told FE during an interaction.
The company had received the final approval for a Prepaid Payment Instruments (PPI) license earlier this year.
“We’ll also be the first payments platform with a subscription-based model, much like OTT platforms,” Chatterjee added.
Revolut will come in three variants: base, premium, and metal, each variant giving users access to a different set of benefits. For instance, if a user chooses the premium plan, they will get premium benefits for both domestic and forex cards. The base model will be available for free initially.
Navigating a competitive and under-adopted prepaid market
While prepaid payment offerings are few among new-age fintech, the overall adoption of prepaid payment instruments remains dismal. RBI data showed that total prepaid transactions were just 3% of overall payment volume in August.
While Revolut has over 65 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 prepaid forex card providers, including traditional banks and new-age fintech, such as Niyo and Scapia, which offer co-branded debit and credit cards with zero charges for forex payments.
Adding to the domestic competition, the share of international payments made through prepaid instruments is only 18% of the total international payments volume recorded in August. When seen in terms of transaction value, the share of prepaid instruments is even lower, at 10%, within total international payments made in August.
For its reward-focused domestic prepaid card, the challenges are deeper. Prepaid card penetration has been historically lower than debit cards in India, with about 489 million cards issued as of August, compared to over a billion debit cards. In FY25, prepaid cards constituted about 25% of the total prepaid payment transaction volume in India.
Revolut follows a few other global fintech giants in venturing into the Indian market. Before Revolut, US-based Stripe obtained an online payments aggregator license in India but later moved to an invite-only mode for new users last year, following stricter KYC norms. Meanwhile, PayPal is launching a globally interoperable wallet platform, PayPal World, on Tuesday, with India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) as the platform’s first payments system partner.