UK's Revolut to launch India operations in second half of 2022, eyes full scale digital banking setup

Paroma Chatterjee, CEO of Revolut India

London-headquartered fintech player Revolut is working on a long-term plan in India and has will hire close to 300 employees by the end of 2022.

In an interview with Moneycontrol, Paroma Chatterjee, the CEO of Revolut India said the company plans to begin with payments by offering cross-border remittances, followed by trading and investments.

"Post that we will evolve into offering credit for both businesses and individuals. Once we have managed to make a meaningful presence in payments, investments, and credit, then that's a logical step to take a leap forward into forming a full-fledged digital bank," Chatterjee said.

Revolut has been expanding beyond the United Kingdom and the United States markets and secured an $800-million funding led by Tiger Global and SoftBank in July last year, which valued the startup at $33 billion.

Founded in 2015 by Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, the company provides a wide range of financial services globally including payments, transfers, investment and trading, payment gateways for businesses, digital banking, debit cards, among others.

For the Indian market, the company has committed an initial investment of a little over $45 million (approx Rs 340 crore).

"The $800-million funding was to fuel Revolut's global expansion strategy. So pretty much the money is on-tap, and the $45 million is the initial round. We have the assurance that as we need money it will be available and Revolut is definitely committed to being in India for the long run," Chatterjee said.

The company has already started work on building a product and engineering hub in India, which will be the first outside of the UK. The hub will also be serving the company's markets around India, mainly in South East Asia.

With a plan to enter various fintech verticals, Revolut will be competing with multiple home-grown and foreign players across India's fintech space. The company will be set against legacy banks and NBFCs, new age fintechs in the space of neobanking like Open, Razorpay, Jupiter etc., and also stock broking platforms like Zerodha, INDMoney, among others.

However unlike neobanking startups that provide the technology layer for banks and NBFCs, Revolut will be building its own banking products and lending from its own books.

Chatterjee said, "If we have to look at building those products, we will be looking at what are licenses (from regulators) are required. You will see us in the market in the second half of this year."

It plans to have a super app in India to provide all financial services under one roof and currently has a waitlist of 30,000 Indians wanting to join the app.