Who are Wise’s outbound competitors in India?
Last week, Wise announced that it was once again going to take on new customers in India after receiving a licence that allows users to send higher amounts of money overseas. We took a closer look at some of the players currently serving outbound remittances in India to analyse the industry landscape.
Recent data from the Reserve Bank of India shows that India’s outbound remittances flows under its Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) are growing, reaching $31.7bn in the 12 month-period leading up to March 2024. The top remittance purposes within this figure were international travel ($17bn), followed by maintenance of close relatives ($4.6bn), gifts ($3.6bn) and studies abroad ($3.5bn).
While major remittances players are maintaining growth in Europe, the US and Asia, India continues to see big banks from the country lead on outbound remittances. One of the reasons for this is the historical difficulty involved with acquiring the licence requirements needed and costs involved with facilitating money transfers from India. Several well-known remittance players – including MoneyGram, Remitly and Ria – are still receive-only in the country, though a number of online money transfer operators have emerged to service Indian users, such as BookMyForex.
Remittances from India can also come with high taxation attached. For example, in a recent update to the country’s LRS, people sending money abroad must pay a 20% tax on remittances over INR 700,000 ($8,340) (excluding education and medical remittances).
India has pushed towards digitalisation as it aims to move away from cashless payments and spur financial inclusion – as can be seen from the extensive spread of India’s instant payment system UPI, which processed 117.6 billion transactions in 2023. UPI has now been adopted by several countries abroad, with the Indian government actively promoting it as a payment method to support India’s 32 million-strong diaspora worldwide. As we found in a recent report, digital wallets – such as Paytm, Google Pay and BHIM – are the single most popular payment instrument in India.
Growing digitalisation in the country and demand for transfers explain why Wise and Revolut (which acquired Indian forex business Arvog in 2022) continue to show interest in the space – however, they will face stiff competition from Indian banks, many of which have launched their own mobile apps and digital remittance offerings. In the meantime, we’ll continue to track how companies are serving remittances to and from the country (as well as benchmarking prices across the competition).
How can I track pricing across corridors to and from India?
