Fintech platform powered by Sequoia Sowwhich allows the Indian diaspora to send money back to India, is launching a new feature for users to pay bills. This means that Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) can pay utility bills or recharge prepaid mobile plans for their family.
The startup said that until now, users had to either transfer the money to their accounts in India or have someone handle the accounts for them. The other option for them was to use their foreign cards and try to pay bills while facing high fees and payment failures.
Aspora has tied up with the Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS), which manages bill payments in India, using Yes Bank’s domestic pipeline. Through this system, it has enabled payment for more than 22,000 billers in India, from electricity providers like BSES and BESCOM, broadband providers like Jio and Airtel, and loan payments for major banks.
The startup said it doesn’t charge fees for these payments and users get the best exchange rates to pay the bill directly in foreign currency.
“For millions of Indians living abroad, paying bills in India has always been unnecessarily complicated – involving transfers, delays and double fees. Aspora has now solved this large-scale problem at the click of a button,” founder and CEO Parth Garg told TechCrunch.
Garg said bill payments may reduce remittances, but only by 4% to 5% of total transfers. Garg believes that giving users the ability to pay bills will create long-term stickiness.
“Today, the goal for every Neo bank is to try to do more and more transactions on your app. With remittances, users used to use the app once or twice a month. Because of this new bill payment system. The new feature increases the speed on our platform and makes our users visit the platform more often,” Garg said.
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He said Aspora has been testing this feature with a few thousand users for several weeks and has seen positive results. The startup noted that mobile recharges were a big use case that emerged from this test. BBPS does not support certain categories such as mobile phone top-up or credit card payments for foreign payers. This is why Apsora is partnering with the international mobile recharge company Tinkling to facilitate these transactions.
The feature is available for customers in the UK and the company plans to make it available to users in the US and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) soon.
In June, Aspora raised $50 million in Series B funding at a $500 million valuation, led by Sequoia. Other investors Greylock, Hummingbird, Quantum Light Ventures and Y Combinator also contributed to the round. The company has raised more than $99 million in funding to date. The startup opened its services in July to NRIs in the US market, which represents the top inbound remittance market for India, with market share of nearly 28% according to the country’s central bank.
Aspora has now reached 800,000 customers, who have transacted $4 billion and saved $25 million in transfer fees, according to the company.
Aspora aims to launch NRE (Non-Resident External) accounts to allow users to manage income from abroad and NRO (Non-Resident Ordinary) accounts to allow users to manage income earned in India next year.
