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What gap in the market led to Winvesta's multi-currency and investment accounts, and how did they capitalize on this insight?
Swastik Nigam
Founder & CEO at Winvesta
India is a capital control country. And that brings its nuanced set of requirements. In the early days of thinking about this particular segment, the cross-border investing in the banking space was that we in India are seeing a great amount of growth in wealth, and that wealth needs to be diversified.
Historically, we've had very, very limited amounts of investment beyond India's shores by Indian investors. As for natural expectation is that as interest will increase, people will recognize the distinctions between what's happening in the Indian markets versus the West. And of course, there's a great and deep amount of penetration by international brands in India. And that, of course, means that people in India will think, "Hey, I am a Google user, I'm an Apple user, why am I not investing in that stock, for example?" So that's one insight.
The second part is, of course, as wealth is growing, that needs to get diversified. People will think a bit more rationally as well, "Hey, it does make sense for me to invest beyond India's borders." But then, even when we look at the data, how much money India has been sending out at a retail individual level has been growing exponentially, about 35, 40% year-on-year over the last decade. A lot of it is bolstered by travel and university fees and maintaining your kids abroad.
That means there's a long-term liability that we are creating in India, where I'm expecting, our kids are expecting, to be going overseas over a period of time. And how do we look at capturing that as a segment? So we think of the liberalized remittance scheme, under which the 250K remittance is made, as a large market in totality. And that gets us to the way we think about, not just providing investing, but banking along with it, because that's a liability hedge in the longer term for the investors and the customers that we go after.