GoKawiilBritish fintech Revolut has quietly begun rolling out its services in India as part of a controlled beta program ahead of a broader launch, marking a significant milestone in its years-long effort to enter the country’s fast-growing digital payments market.
Revolut started taking signups for its India app earlier this year, and some users who joined the waitlist have been gaining access to its services over the past few weeks, TechCrunch has learned. The company confirmed the rollout and said a few thousand customers in India are already using the platform.
The rollout marks a significant milestone in Revolut’s years-long effort to enter India, a major digital payments market where the federal government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has transformed how consumers and businesses move money. UPI accounts for nearly half of global real-time payments transaction volume and processed a record 23.2 billion transactions worth ₹29.9 trillion (around $313.8 billion) in May, per Indian government data.
A Revolut spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company is currently “in the controlled onboarding of waitlisters” and that a beta version of its app, localized for Indian users, is available through the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store.
“This is being done in order to gather feedback on core product functioning and enhance the overall customer experience and the value proposition before opening up the platform for a larger audience,” the spokesperson said.
The rollout is currently limited to a small subset of the company’s around 450,000 waitlisted users.
Users in the beta program can access UPI payments, e-money wallets, domestic prepaid cards, multi-currency cards, virtual cards, and disposable cards, the company said. Revolut plans to add its Lifestyle and RevPoints offerings before expanding the rollout. Family, or joint, accounts — available in some of Revolut’s overseas markets — will not be offered in India because such products require a banking license, the company said.
Revolut has been building its India business since 2021 and hired fintech executive Paroma Chatterjee to lead its local operations. In 2022, the London-headquartered company acquired Arvog Forex to strengthen its regulatory presence in the country and offer remittance and multi-currency account services. It later secured a prepaid payment instrument (PPI) license from the Reserve Bank of India, allowing it to issue prepaid cards, support digital wallets, and integrate with the UPI network.
The company told TechCrunch that it plans to open the app to direct onboarding of all users in the “near future” but declined to provide a specific launch timeline. Chatterjee had previously said in a LinkedIn post that Revolut was targeting a full product launch in India in Q2.
Revolut is targeting India’s growing base of digitally savvy consumers as it seeks to challenge incumbent banks and fintech firms in one of the world’s most competitive financial services markets. The company has previously said it aims to serve more than 150 million “globally aspiring, digitally native” Indians aged between 25 and 45, with a goal of onboarding about 20 million users by 2030 and processing at least $7 billion in transactions.
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