Payments Startup Flutterwave Partners IndusInd Bank to Expand Into India

African payments startup Flutterwave is reportedly expanding into the Indian market through a partnership with IndusInd Bank.

This move makes Flutterwave the first African company to scale up remittances from India to Africa, streamlining the process for users, Bloomberg reported Friday (Sept. 8), citing an interview with Flutterwave Co-founder and CEO Olugbenga Agboola.

Reached for comment by PYMNTS, a Flutterwave spokesperson said the company is building a “quick and secure” remittance corridor from the U.K. to India via a partnership with IndusInd Bank and is planning to build one from Africa to India in the future.

IndusInd Bank, a leading financial institution in India, serves approximately 35 million customers across the country, including individuals, large corporations and government entities, according to the report.

Flutterwave has experienced rapid growth since its establishment in 2016 and currently operates in about 30 African countries, the report said. A January 2022 funding round valued the company at $3 billion.

The company has attracted significant investments from venture capital firms like Tiger Global Management and formed partnerships with notable companies such as Alibaba’s Alipay, Uber Technologies and Netflix, per the report. A recent agreement with French company Capgemini also bolstered Flutterwave’s engineering infrastructure.

Agboola told Bloomberg that Flutterwave is a partnership-driven organization and looks forward to collaborating with more bank partners in India.

In another recent development, the company announced Aug. 1 that it has extended its remittance solution to the United States and Canada, enabling money transfers from those countries to Africa. That expansion brought to 34 the number of countries around the world in which the Send App can be used to send and receive money.

A month earlier, in July, Flutterwave launched a product to help African users conveniently pay fees to educational institutions both within Africa and overseas by using their local currencies. This payment product, Tuition, is designed to be used by students, parents, guardians and sponsors, providing them with a payment solution that safe, reliable, affordable and seamless.

In a third recent expansion of its services, the company partnered with Token.io to begin offering pay-by-bank transfers, “making it even faster and easier for individuals and businesses to pay and receive money.”

Flutterwave said at the time that this pay by bank, or account-to-account (A2A) payments, offering lets users quickly and securely move money between accounts, without registration or error-prone data entry.