Revolut plans India launch in 2025

Revolut established a presence in India in April 2021, but it was not until earlier this year that it secured an in-principle authorisation from India’s central bank to issue prepaid cards and wallets

Revolut is planning to launch in India next year, targeting top-tier consumers in the country as part of aggressive expansion efforts.

The London-based banking app is eyeing India’s lucrative fintech market, which serves millions of consumers within its growing middle class.

Revolut established a presence in India in April 2021, but it was not until earlier this year that it secured an in-principle authorisation from India’s central bank to issue prepaid cards and wallets.

After testing products among its more than 4,000 local employees, Revolut India expects to launch its app, domestic and multi-currency cards in 2025.

We are actually very, very close, we are literally down to single-digit bugs right now in the system, Paroma Chatterjee, chief executive of Revolut’s Indian arm, told the Financial Times. India is being treated as a critical expansion market.

Revolut, Europe’s most valuable fintech, is trying to diversify into new revenue streams outside Europe, which contributed to more than 90% of its sales last year.

The fintech received an EU banking licence from the Bank of Lithuania in December 2021 and now boasts over 10 million retail customers in eastern and central Europe alone.

In India, New Delhi has backed the proliferation of fintech through the India Stack – a digital infrastructure allowing firms to build integrated apps with access to services such as ID verification, loans and welfare payments.

There will be a significant number of competitors in the market, all with a significant amount of funding, Chatterjee said. We will have to earn our right to win this market.

She added that, given India’s low GDP per capita, the realistic size of Revolut’s market in the country was “pretty much” the top 10 to 15% of its 1.4 billion population, “which is sizeable”.

That is the segment that also consumes Netflix, that consumes your Apple products. That travels and travels internationally as well, what I term the global India, she said.

They have friends and family overseas, they have probably studied overseas, worked overseas and come back or vice versa, she added.

Revolut is due to file an audit report with India’s central bank next month with the goal of becoming fully authorised.

Chatterjee said Revolut’s strategy for India upon securing this approval was “not just blindly scale focused – we are very profitability focused”.