The Indian consumer has gone global, even if banking hasn’t 

Article Summary 

• Indian consumers are increasingly global in how they travel, study, work, invest, and spend, yet their financial infrastructure remains largely rupee- and India-centric. 

• The next frontier for fintech may be cross-border banking rather than simply cross-border investing, allowing consumers to save, invest, spend, and hold money across currencies. 

• Regulation and compliance remain the hidden infrastructure behind seamless global finance, requiring fintechs to build sophisticated systems across multiple jurisdictions. 

• The idea of a “home-country bank” is increasingly at odds with a world where people themselves are becoming geographically and financially mobile. 

There is a peculiar mismatch at the heart of India’s financial transformation. The Indian consumer is increasingly global. The Indian bank account is not. 

An Indian professional can work remotely for a company headquartered in California, send a child to university in London, invest in American equities, spend a month travelling through Europe, and buy products from businesses on the other side of the world. Yet the financial architecture supporting all of this still tends to begin and end with a rupee account in India. 

Sitashwa Srivastava, founder and CEO of Borderless, sees that mismatch as one of the more consequential opportunities in financial services. 

His starting point is simple: Indian financial behaviour has changed dramatically over the past decade. Srivastava points to the amount Indians spend in global markets rising from roughly $1-2 billion a year to almost $30 billion. The precise number matters less than the direction of travel. Indians are travelling more, studying abroad, working for global companies, settling overseas, investing internationally, and increasingly thinking of themselves as participants in a global economy. 

Their money, however, still has to negotiate the borders their lives increasingly ignore. 

Consider the difference between investing internationally and actually building a financial life internationally. An Indian investor can open an overseas investment account, transfer dollars, buy a fund or a portfolio, and watch the investment grow. But when the money is eventually redeemed, it can come back to India as rupees. If the original purpose was to build a corpus for a child’s education abroad, that creates a strange detour. The money has travelled across borders only to be brought home before being sent abroad again. 

The foreign exchange risk is one problem. The regulatory architecture is another. 

Under India’s Liberalised Remittance Scheme, residents can remit up to $250,000 a year. The annual limit resets, but the practical problem remains: moving money back into India and subsequently wanting to send it abroad again can create a constraint precisely when the money is needed overseas. 

The more interesting question, then, is whether cross-border finance should be built around transactions or around financial continuity.  

Srivastava believes the latter is where the opportunity lies. The logical product, in his view, is less a foreign investment account and more a foreign financial home: a place where a customer can hold dollars, save, invest, and eventually spend those dollars without repeatedly converting the money back into rupees. 

That distinction matters because wealth is becoming more mobile. Europe offers an early glimpse of what this could look like. The rise of fintechs such as Revolut and Wise helped make multi-currency financial lives considerably more ordinary. A person travelling from France to Britain does not necessarily need to think of the border as a financial reset. 

Emerging markets are now approaching a similar inflection point, although their regulatory and economic structures are considerably more complicated. India is particularly interesting because its citizens are becoming wealthier and more internationally mobile while the country’s financial system remains deeply shaped by domestic regulation, domestic currency, and domestic banking relationships. 

The challenge for fintech, therefore, is not simply creating a better interface. Much of the real innovation is invisible. Cross-border finance requires KYC, anti-money-laundering checks, regulatory licences, taxation frameworks, currency management, and compliance across jurisdictions. Srivastava says Borderless can conduct KYC across roughly 190 countries and has built regulatory capabilities across India, the US, and GIFT City. 

That is the unglamorous machinery beneath the promise of frictionless finance. It also points to something important about the future of fintech. The winners may not necessarily be the companies that own every financial product. They may be the ones that make the underlying financial system sufficiently seamless for customers to stop thinking about where a particular product sits. 

Srivastava describes Borderless’s ambition in similar terms. The company wants to own the banking and investing experience, while allowing specialist asset managers and portfolio managers to provide the investment products themselves. 

As fintech matures, that seems like a wise play. The first generation of digital finance largely asked how existing financial products could be made faster, cheaper, and easier to access. The next generation may ask a more fundamental question: Why should a person’s financial life have to be organised around the borders of the country in which they happen to live? 

The answer, for now, is regulation, taxation, currency, and the considerable complexity of moving money across jurisdictions. But those are precisely the problems financial technology is supposed to make easier. 

The Indian consumer may already have crossed the border. The banking system is now playing catch-up.