Flutterwave Announces Expansion to Indian Market

By Adedapo Adesanya

Africa’s most valued startup, Flutterwave, has announced it is entering the Indian market after it signed a partnership with IndusInd Bank Limited, a leading financial institution in India, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the South Asian country.

According to the co-founder and CEO of the company, Mr Olugbenga Agboola, the agreement will enable Flutterwave, worth about $3 billion, to expand its remittance product into the country banking on IndusInd Bank’s 35 million customers across the country, including individuals, large corporations, and various government entities.

“The Indian expansion for Flutterwave will be the first African company to do this at a scale where remittances from India to Africa become seamless and quick,” Mr Agboola said in an interview Friday, per Bloomberg.

Mr Agboola is in India alongside President Bola Tinubu for the G20 summit scheduled for the weekend (September 9 – 10).

He also said the company has secured an agreement with French company Capgemini, an IT service management company, to help strengthen its engineering infrastructure.

“We are a partnership-driven organization. So, as we see more bank partners to work with in India, we’ll definitely embrace that,” Mr Agboola said.

This is the latest development after he announced recently that the unicorn is pressing ahead with plans for an initial public offering (IPO) despite controversies.

Although a time for the IPO has not been announced, the Flutterwave CEO assured that it was in the works. He said the plan was limited by the current market environment, which he said was not “great right now.”

Flutterwave saw payment processing business through its payments app, SendApp, increase 23-fold in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2022, while payments through point-of-sale (PoS) devices rose more than fivefold, and revenue in its small and medium business units jumped almost fourfold.

Since its founding in 2016, Flutterwave has rapidly expanded and now has a presence in about 30 African countries.