"India Is At The Heart Of Our Global Money Movement": Smrithi Ravi, APAC Head Of Engineering At Wise

With the rapid rise of UPI, digital KYC, and a tech-savvy population driving innovation, India has become one of the most critical markets for global fintechs. For Wise, India is not just a growth market, but a strategic engineering hub. In this conversation, Smrithi Ravi, APAC Head of Engineering at Wise, shares why the company is doubling down on India with a new tech hub in Hyderabad, how Wise adapts its global infrastructure to local complexities, and what’s next in its mission to build the network for the world’s money — from India, for the world.

1. From an engineering standpoint, why is India a critical market in Wise’s global growth strategy—especially within the APAC region?

India sits at the heart of global money movement and has been integral to Wise's journey since 2013 when we started powering payments for the Indian diaspora sending money back home. Today, we power about 10% of money sent from abroad to India. 

The innovation that we’re seeing in India is very exciting. The country has one of the most digitally connected populations, with instant payments infrastructure like the UPI setting consumers’ expectations for seamless, low-cost and fast experiences for payments. The engineering innovation in the fintech field in India over the last 5 years has been incredible, from UPI changing the instant payments game to digital KYC transforming identification. These innovations benefit the cross-border payments space because they improve transaction speeds and make digital international payments accessible to more people.

Our mission is to build the network for the world’s money, and India represents one of the key hubs for us to build this from. The strong product and engineering talent pool in India, combined with our local presence, will allow us to understand regional context deeply and build products and features that serve customers in India as well as the world. 

2. What strategic impact do you expect the new Hyderabad office to have on Wise’s global technology and product development roadmap? 

The Hyderabad office will be a full stack office, housing teams across all of Wise’s functions — from product and engineering to operations, customer support and more. A hub office becomes an integral part of our global technology and product development, where teams build both locally relevant features as well as contribute to the global roadmap. We’ve seen this in all of our other hub offices as well, and we expect Hyderabad to play a similar key role in the near future. 

This strategy aligns with our core belief about building for the long term where we’re creating the infrastructure that makes money movement cheaper, faster, more convenient, and transparent for customers everywhere.

3. How does Wise’s engineering team adapt global infrastructure to meet India’s regulatory environment, customer behavior, and unique payment ecosystem?

Allow me to explain a bit more about Wise’s technology. Unlike traditional providers, Wise doesn’t rely on the outdated correspondent banking network where payments pass through multiple intermediary banks, adding delays and costs to every transaction. Instead, we invested in building a scalable alternative to traditional correspondent banking. Our infrastructure connects to local payment systems around the world, which also includes 6 direct connections into domestic rails like FAST in Singapore and InstaPay in the Philippines. This allows us to process transactions end-to-end on our own infrastructure with more visibility and efficiency, making cross-border transfers cheaper, faster, and more convenient. 

Building these connections and making it scalable requires us to go deep to understand each market’s requirements. For instance, understanding compliance frameworks, screening processes, liquidity processes, settlement times and more. 

This is why Wise believes in a global-local approach to engineering. This means having a highly sophisticated, market-agnostic infrastructure built to the highest standards and regulatory standards, then having specialised regional teams adapting it for local regulations and payment ecosystems. These localised needs are extremely market specific, so we have dedicated teams across APAC, Europe, North America, Latin America. Each team combines deep market expertise with engineering capabilities to bring Wise’s global products to their markets. 

Take India as an example. We provide a Digilocker-based onboarding experience that's aligned with regulations and well understood by Indian customers. We've also integrated UPI so global customers can send money to India using just a UPI ID, eliminating the complexity of bank details. 

More recently, we launched international account details for Indian freelancers to get paid from abroad. We know businesses struggle with expensive fees and opaque pricing when receiving payments from abroad, so we built a solution that lets them get paid in 8 currencies, including USD, GBP, EUR, at the mid-market exchange rate. We also provide eFIRC to customers within minutes, helping them conveniently meet their tax obligations.

Zooming out to APAC, the regional teams here are also responsible for building direct integrations into the domestic payment schemes in Singapore, Australia, the Philippines, and soon in Japan, which makes cross-border payments more seamless. 

4. Are there any India-specific products, features, or enhancements in the pipeline—particularly ones being built or led from the Hyderabad tech team?

Without giving too much away, yes! We want to build products for India, from India.

Globally, our product suite goes beyond just money transfers to include the account and card for people and businesses to spend, receive, convert and manage money in multiple currencies. We also enable banks and financial institutions to integrate our infrastructure into their systems to provide low-cost and fast cross-border payments to their own customers via Wise Platform. 

Looking ahead, our focus is to continue building on our infrastructure and bring more of Wise’s products to India — so for me this is just the start. 

5. As a tech leader, what are some of the biggest lessons you've learned while scaling cross-border financial infrastructure in a diverse and dynamic market like India?

Cross-border infrastructure is diverse, complex, and Wise has set a high bar by building extremely convenient, low-cost and fast cross-border payments. Being a tech leader in this space means quickly adapting to diverse tech landscapes across many markets to deliver the best cross border product to customers.

India has been particularly exciting as customers come with high expectations on product quality and pricing, and we constantly evolve to meet them. Leading in APAC has taught me that sometimes it’s about leveraging what’s available in a market and integrating — like UPI in India. Other times, it’s about bringing innovation we’ve developed elsewhere to new markets, like our liveness detection ID verification technology that we built in house to detect whether a real person is present during the process. 

You can’t simply take a one-sized-fits-all approach when payments infrastructure, regulatory requirements and customer behaviour differ so much from country to country. We’re committed to building for the long term and do this by spending time understanding local nuances, establishing strong local teams and connections with regulators and partners. 

Ultimately, scaling globally should be a marathon, not a sprint. Every business wants to grow fast, but we never let that come at the expense of business sustainability. We are incredibly disciplined about ensuring what and where we are investing aligns with our mission to make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, more convenient and transparent — this approach is how we’ve remained a sustainable, profitable business for years.

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