What makes Winvesta's recently launched UPI and banking-based remittance service different from existing services in the market?

One of the biggest points of friction is sending money out. Some folks have chosen to help you open a neo-bank account with another bank and then deposit money there, and then that bank maybe is just slightly better than your regular bank in terms of sending money out. So that's one flow.

We thought that doesn't really solve the client's problem from a sustainable point of view, which is why the RBI had a cohort, which was the regulatory sandbox aimed at cross-border capital flow. 

We partnered with the payment provider and an AD-1 bank to provide our end customers the capability, the first of its kind in India, where customers could send money using UPI into an international account that we had.

If you have a hundred customers, all of that value will be put together, made as one bulk payment out, and then distributed out to the brokerage accounts. That was exceptional, because today, when you send money out straight from your bank account, and even if you open a neo-bank account, you're not able to collate all that capital because of regulatory requirements and send it altogether.

The regulator wants to see on a business-as-usual basis that each and every customer's flow is going out individually. That adds to a lot of fixed costs. You don’t get the benefits of pooling a lot of capital together and reduce the variable costs. It was very well lapped up by our customers. We took quite a few punches because we had a very short period of time to execute and to roll it out and to have it successful. There were glitches at every level, as one would expect, we tried to smoothen it as much as possible.

Every participant, including the regulator, was learning from this process. We're glad that we gave 100% assurance that we will cover the full experiment that they want to run in terms of customer acquisition for this particular part.