Uber Money Expands To India

In a move that bolsters its financial technology presence in India, Uber has put an Uber Money team into place in Hyderabad. Uber Money teams are also located in Palo Alto, Amsterdam, New York and San Francisco tech centers, Livemint reported.

The Uber Money team will be geared toward putting into place new payment methods, harnessing smart routing technologies for payment gateways, using Uber artificial intelligence (AI) models for intelligent risk decisions and enabling as well as developing financial compliance tools.

The team will be made up of over 100 technology professionals tasked with global financial products as well as technology innovations at its Hyderabad Tech Center that would reportedly make it the inaugural facility in the Asia-Pacific region. It will enable upcoming new worldwide improvements as well as features, with the inclusion of real-time earnings, among other features.

Naga Kasu, engineering director and Hyderabad site lead, Uber, said per the report, “The Uber Hyderabad Tech Centre has the best in class fintech talent specializing in risk, payments, financial reporting and analytics platform engineering. Besides engineering, we are investing in growing and scaling data science, analytics, and product management organizations to transform Hyderabad into a full spectrum tech site for Uber.”

Uber Money in India would be reportedly based on Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the real-time payment system of the National Payments Corp. of India (NPCI).

In separate Uber news from India, the ride-hailing service is selling its delivery offering to competitor Zomato for a 9.99 percent business stake per news in January.

The Zomato deal reportedly valued Uber Eats India in the range of between $160 million and $200 million. Forrester analyst Satish Meena told reporters that even with the Uber deal, Zomato’s local rival Swiggy has a bigger portion of India’s food delivery business. Zomato was valued at $3.55 billion earlier in January and started in 2008.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement, “India remains an exceptionally important market to Uber and we will continue to invest in growing our local Rides business.”