Sequoia-backed fintech platform Aspora, which lets the Indian diaspora send money back to India, is launching a new feature for users to pay bills. This means Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) can pay utility bills or recharge their mobile prepaid plans for their family.
The startup said that until now, users had to either transfer the money to their Indian accounts or ask someone to handle the bills for them. The other option for them was to use their foreign cards and try and pay bills while facing high charges and payment failures.
Aspora has hooked up to the Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS), which handles 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, ranging from electricity providers such as BSES and BESCOM, broadband providers like Jio and Airtel, and loan payments for major banks.
The startup said it’s not charging any fees for these payments, and the users get the best exchange rates to pay the bill directly in foreign currency.
“For millions of Indians living overseas, paying bills in India has always been unnecessarily complex – involving transfers, delays, and double fees. Aspora has now solved this large-scale problem at the tap of a button”, Aspora founder and CEO Parth Garg told TechCrunch in a recent phone interview.
Garg said bill payments might reduce remittances, but only by 4% to 5% of total transfers. Garg believes giving users the ability to pay bills will create long-term stickiness.
“Today, the goal for any Neo bank is to try to get more and more transactions on your app. With remittances, people used to use the app once or twice a month. Because of this new bill payment system. The new feature increases velocity on our platform and has our users visit the platform more frequently,” Garg mentioned.
He said Aspora has been testing this feature with a few thousand users for a several weeks now, and it has seen positive results. The startup noted that mobile recharges were a big use case that emerged out of this test. BBPS doesn’t support some categories, like mobile recharge or credit card payments for foreign payers. That is why Apsora has partnered with international mobile recharge company Ding 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 U.S. 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 up its services in July to NRIs in the U.S. market, which accounts for the top inward remittance market for India, with nearly 28% market share according to the country’s central bank.
Aspora has now reached 800,000 customers, who have done transactions of $4 billion and saved $25 million in transfer fees, according to the company.
Aspora aims to launch NRE (Non-Resident External) accounts to let users manage foreign income and NRO (Non-Resident Ordinary) accounts to let users manage incoming earned in India next year.
