190 karma · joined October 20, 2016
We help you make cashless spends at over 55 million+ merchants across India.
learn more: https://www.chequpi.com
Your wallet will remain active and you can use the funds next time you visit again.
But we have geofencing restrictions which prevent customers from initiating payments while outside the country. Due to certain regulatory restrictions.
Behind the scenes story below :
Until last year, there was no way for Indian fintechs to provide UPI services to international citizens.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) decided in January 2023 to issue UPI enabled wallets to international citizens visiting India during G20.
We got a call late at night asking if our team can quickly deliver this solution.
Our team stepped up and the first version was delivered within 30 days.
This app was used to showcase UPI to various the G20 delegates who visited Bangalore in February.
We've spent another 5 months tweaking things and finally, we feel ready to launch the app in front of you :)
1) https://transcorpint.com/find-us => You can verify yourself at any of these centers across India.
We'll improve the site to directly point customers to appropriate verification centers (thanks for pointing this out)
2) OCI holders are accepted as well. Only your passport and OCI card are required
3) Add funds facility is instantenous. And is available in the app once you've finished the verification. You'll be able to add funds via any card, and instantly receive funds in your Cheq wallet for spending.
10$ joining fees and a 3.5% markup on adding funds is the current business plan.
We'll observe customer usage over the next 3-6 months and figure out if fixed fee subscriptions can be cheaper.
> Also how did you build a legal structure to allow this ?
We've partnered with Transcorp International Limited to operate the Cheq app in India. They are an RBI approved AD2 and PPI license holder. Customer funds are parked in an escrow account with them until utilized via the UPI network.
This is also why Cheq physical verification can happen only at Transcorp branches currently.
You can think of Cheq as a technology platform using Transcorp as our banking partner.
Or Transcorp, as a financial services firm, using Cheq as its technology partner.
We're trying to stay away from unsustainable economics
1) Cheq charges a 10$ joining fees to everyone who activates their wallet.
2) We'll eventually charge an add money markup for topping up your wallet using an international card
You can always stick to cash and card as your preferred mode of payments in India.
Having a UPI wallet can be a convenient backup for travellers though. You won't have to run around finding an ATM in case you get stuck.
And the verification process might seem "difficult" but its one-time and less painful than visiting a doctor.
Given the applicable forex regulations, I guess that's the best we're allowed to enable right now.
Using Cheq, you can keep your bank account plus mobile number secret. Everyday small value transactions can also be consolidated separately from your main bank account.
I don't think anyone is selling data in the UPI ecosystem but if they are, that's a very short-sighted strategy to make money for sure.
You'll just have to enter the transaction PIN (which you decide while creating the account).
Sim binding generally fails because the individual is unable to send an sms due to recharge/network issues. Can you raise a ticket with the support team? Someone will quickly get in touch and help you onboard.
People can get themselves verified for the Cheq wallet at any of these locations.
Legal Name -> Yes, everyone gets to see your full name post scanning the UPI payment app.
But this is a feature not a bug. Since in most cases I want to confirm the identity of the person I am paying to.
And allowing people to display any name as their UPI username will lead to much more identity fraud than you can imagine.
https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/ppi-apps
These two links list all the approved UPI apps in the Indian fintech market. As you can see, the ecosystem is vibrant and ever-growing :)
We are the first ones to focus exclusively on serving foreigners and NRIs in India and have issued the most number of international wallets till date.
Fave app and First Rupi(from IDFC) are alternatives you can try if interested.
However, I've spent a lot of time studying the payments space (7+ years now!) and I'll quickly give you 3 reasons why UPI is "better" than Interrac for example :
1) Better User Experience
Systems like Interrac enable instant bank to bank transfers. However, they don't allow for third party applications to initiate payment requests / view balances. Customers are restricted to choosing a bank and sticking with the user experience defined by the bankers.
UPI , on the other hand, mandates banks to accept and honor payment requests generated from "Third-party payment application providers (TPAPs)"
This allows for a much larger variety of payment experiences to be designed, which can be "fit on top" of the existing banking layer.
PSD2 regulations, in Europe tried to achieve this effect, however most banks ended up implementing a custom version of the protocol instead of adoption a common standard.
2) Lower costs
Adoption of the UPI payments system has massively reduced the cost of sending money anywhere across India.
For Indian banks, the cost of sending money via UPI is wayy less than the "Gas fees" required to facilitate crypto transactions or the fees charged by VISA/MC networks to facilitate transactions.
Similarly, costs for a merchant to accept UPI payments are much lesser than accepting any other form of digital payment today (in India and maybe the world).
3) Federated Architecture
From Day-1, the UPI ecosystem has been design to support multiple switch providers, payment institutions and local regulations.
If countries like France, adopt UPI, they won't have to depend on centralized servers hosted in India to run their payments technology.
All their data can be hosted in servers within the country and the UPI instance facilitating French transactions can be tailored to honor local regulations and limits.
This flexibility is not as easy to implement with older payment systems (like VISA/MC).
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Much of this can also be attributed to the fact that the other payment systems were developed 15+ years ago.
The recently launched, FedNow system adopts a similar approach to UPI. Will be interesting to see how it evolves
Banks / UPI vendors have to comply with very strict data regulations and the confirmation of a "data leak" is enough to attract heavy penalties from the NPCI and RBI. Most banks and UPI service providers will never risk it, specially post the DEPA guidelines which have recently been adopted.
In Blr/Mumbai/Delhi, our team can arrange for home verifications as well.
This will hide your phone number.
Eg: My UPI id is sudshekhar.cheq@trans.
Most other UPI apps allow you to create such handles AFAIK.
Nowadays, you can also keep your bank details private by using UPI with a wallet instead of savings account.
For example
Sudhanshu here, from Cheq UPI.
We're a part of YC S23 and our team launched the Cheq UPI payments app specifically to help international citizens and NRIs avail UPI.
Some testimonials from our early customers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ct5WY9vOz4
We launched officially in August, and are growing fast. Next time you travel to india, do give us a try :)
PS: We don't need an Indian bank account to help you make payments.
Had to reach out to them on twitter to get things moving. Horrible stuff.
At the same time, its interesting how broken this ecosystem is (despite the presence of several players vetting these 'companies').
My best suggestion: talk to Indian devs you know (and respect) and ask them for referrals of people back home.
In India, this happens simply because private hospitals don't want mortalities on their hands. Complicated cases often mean higher chances of things going wrong. Best let the public hospitals handle it.
What about dairy products (like milk) etc?
a) Plan to learn/read something new
b) Just finished a book/tv series and want to connect with others around it.
c) Looking for recommendations in various genres
Daily news/connecting with people/cat videos are very far away from my use case. Just append "reddit" to qoogle search query and 9 times out of 10, I am golden.
This was my original inspiration: https://aaronparecki.com/2015/08/29/8/why-i-live-in-irc
My current plan is to read a lot of books and focus on my writing skills. Other goal is to keep my tech chops up to date (so I can easily move back if I don't like this role).
At the risk of being presumptious, I would classify searches into broadly two categories:
1) Finding good providers/discussion places regarding something you need, say news, goods, experiences etc
2) Finding more info about a specific piece of content/goods . Eg: Product reviews, solutions to some technical doubts etc
For most people I know, 1) is pretty much sorted. They have a list of places they check for clothes, groceries, jobs etc. News is read from specific websites/apps. Reddit/HN/Fb/Twitter provide most the social interaction and discovery aspects.
2) is where I see Google providing much more value. But the way things are proceeding, most of the top links relevant to a google search are generally from aggregators themselves. Amazon for most ecommerce, Tripadvisor for travel, Stackoverflow for tech, Practo (in India) for doctors etc.
Let's assume Stackoverflow introduces points for using (and help 'improving') their own search. Most people will open stackoverflow first before searching on google. Amazon has already achieved this level for most things related to e-comm (specially less expensive products).
There will still be a market for Google ofcourse, but it will be a much smaller chunk than currently being predicted.
I actually stumbled across this line of reasoning when somebody asked me if its a good idea for individual service providers (docs/merchants etc) to open their own websites. For 99% of them it isn't.
Ofcourse, any counter comments are welcome!
With the growth of 'category kings' (Amazon, Stackoverflow, Wikipedia etc) does anybody else feel that google's search becomes less and less useful?
I never understood the 90's obsession with domain names until I skimmed several news articles from that era. The main logic was:
1. People will go to a couple of websites for most their needs, the ones with memorable names will be easier to go to.
2. Things like search engines (Google) weren't as hot as curation directories (yahoo) because nobody expected so much fragmentation on the web.
3. The more fragmented the market in an industry, higher the value of search ads. If you know the most options and high quality reviews are available on Amazon, you don't really bother with as many reviews.
While this analysis failed for the past few years, with the amount of consolidation happening in the industry recently its possible search engines loose their main source of income (e-commerce) and start being used more from ideleness/curiosity perspective.
Wonder if google should pre-emptively start penalizing the aggregation marketplaces and promote direct providers (essentially try to be the Ebay for everything) to prevent such an outcome.
This, this and this.
There's isn't a dearth of good talent out there. Please just be willing to pay a fair price (not just for the hours worked but for the fact that he's available to you on demand, cc Adam Smith).
As an aside, I do believe freelancer.com should do a better job filtering candidates (and gigs). Can maybe turn into a premium service like toptal.
Can you explain your process more? Do you hold not eat for 18 or so hours for those 6 days?