Xare’s ‘elegant solution’ is disrupting the way millions share their money
▶ Dubai company was launched in 2021 and it has brought financial inclusion to users in more than 180 countries, writes Felicity Glover
When Padmini Gupta and her Xare co-founders launched the platform in January 2021 under the umbrella of their original FinTech Rise, little did they know just how much they would disrupt the sharing economy with their idea to transform smart money management and financial inclusion around the world.
The Dubai-based start-up began as a platform that allowed foreign workers to eliminate the cost of remittance fees by sharing real-time access to their bank accounts and credit cards with their families and friends.
The multi-use Xare – pronounced “share” – app enables users to set daily or monthly limits for recipients, provide short-term loans through credit cards, set up expense accounts for colleagues or send pocket money to their children without them seeing the details of the account.
“This idea of moving money to give your family the ability to spend has actually not evolved in the digital era,” says Ms Gupta, who is also chief executive of the company, which she founded with chief product officer Milind Singh and chief technology officer Mandeep Singh.
“By removing this need to move money and essentially just sharing spending capacity, we’ve created this global disrupter to remittances – we’re instant, you don’t need to actually keep checking back to see if the money arrived and you can do micro [payments].”
Since its launch, Xare has been spun off from Rise and expanded to include other services such as XareAnywhere, which allows users to shop from websites worldwide by using a credit or debit card that has been shared by a family member or friend who can set a spending limit without revealing the card details.
It also introduced “card-pooling” app XareClub, in which users invite friends and family to “club together” their cards to take advantage of bank offers and discounts they would not normally have access to.
So far, more than 15,000 “clubs” have been created on the XareClub app.
In two years, Xare has grown to more than 2 million users in 180-plus countries, with about $2 billion shared on the platform to date, says Ms Gupta.
“I had a gut feel we had the numbers [to make Xare succeed] but we didn’t expect it to be this much, this fast,” the former banker says.
“We’ve worked a lot towards making it happen and that sort of exponential growth is hard to get.”
The global acceleration of FinTech and digital payment since the start of the coronavirus pandemic has unlocked financial opportunities for millions who did not have access to bank accounts.
Annually, the global mobile money industry processes more than $1 trillion of transactions, according to the State of the Industry 2022 report by the GSM Association, the body that represents mobile network operators.
“Mobile money continues to grow rapidly, bringing a suite of financial products to the fingertips of hundreds of millions of users and disrupting traditional financial services,” the GSM Association says in the report. Meanwhile, about 22 per cent of the GCC’s population is unbanked, compared with 60 per cent in North Africa, according to a report by consultancy Strategy&.
Seventy-nine per cent of young adults in the Mena region are unbanked, and 72 per cent of the poorest citizens can benefit from financial inclusion, according to the Arab Monetary Fund. Most financial services have been set up for income earners despite two thirds of the world relying on someone else’s salary, which represents about $25 trillion spent in this way, Ms Gupta says.
“Those income earners are trying to figure out ‘how am I going to get that money across to the people that depend on me’,” she says.
“One of the reasons why we feel Xare is really great is the connections between the person that earns the income and the people that want to spend it.”
Ms Gupta and her co-founders bootstrapped Xare for the first year but have since raised $10 million through investors such as MS&AD Ventures, Middle East Venture Partners, Astra Amco and the Dubai International Financial Centre.
Aside from adding features to Xare, the founders set up an office in Silicon Valley in December, in an effort to expand its North American market.
It acquired Bengaluru startup Rive for an undisclosed amount in January to use India’s unified payments interface, which the Indian government opened up to non-resident Indians, foreign tourists and business travellers in January, Ms Gupta says.
Rive allows credit card users to scan and pay in real time for items using more than 60 million QR codes around the country with zero charges to merchants.
“The expansion is going to be around building more on Rive [and] building more on XareClub, building more on Xare to fill the needs for that two thirds of the world that need more financial services catered to them,” Ms Gupta says.
This idea of moving money to give your family the ability to spend has actually not evolved in the digital era
PADMINI GUPTA
Chief executive, Xare