**Aspora Launches Bill Payment Feature for NRIs, Expanding Its Offerings for the Indian Diaspora**
Aspora, a fintech startup backed by Sequoia, has announced the launch of a new bill payment feature targeting the Indian diaspora. This new service allows Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) to directly pay utility bills or recharge prepaid mobile plans for their families in India, streamlining a process that has traditionally been cumbersome and expensive.
**Solving a Long-Standing Challenge for NRIs**
For millions of Indians living abroad, supporting family back home often means sending money to cover everyday expenses like electricity, water, and internet bills. Until now, NRIs typically had to either transfer funds to Indian bank accounts or rely on family members to handle these payments. Another alternative was to attempt direct payment using foreign credit or debit cards—a process fraught with high foreign transaction fees, unfavorable exchange rates, and frequent payment failures.
Aspora’s founder and CEO, Parth Garg, spoke about this challenge in an interview with TechCrunch. He explained, "For millions of Indians living overseas, paying bills in India has always been unnecessarily complex – involving transfers, delays, and double fees. Aspora has now solved this large-scale problem at the tap of a button." The new feature aims to eliminate the hassle, making it easier and more cost-effective for NRIs to ensure essential services for their families remain uninterrupted.
**Integration with Bharat Bill Payment System**
To enable this seamless experience, Aspora has integrated its platform with the Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS), India’s centralized bill payments infrastructure, via Yes Bank’s domestic pipeline. Through this integration, Aspora users can now pay bills to over 22,000 billers across India. This includes electricity boards like BSES and BESCOM, broadband companies such as Jio and Airtel, and even loan payments to major banks.
Crucially, Aspora is not charging any fees for these bill payments, and users benefit from competitive exchange rates. This means NRIs can pay directly in their local foreign currency without worrying about hidden costs or poor conversion rates.
**Driving Engagement and Platform Stickiness**
While the new feature could reduce the volume of traditional remittance transfers by an estimated 4% to 5%, Garg believes the trade-off is worthwhile. He notes that increased utility and convenience will encourage users to engage with the Aspora platform more frequently. "With remittances, people used to use the app once or twice a month. Because of this new bill payment system, the new feature increases velocity on our platform and has our users visit the platform more frequently," Garg explained.
Aspora has already tested the bill payment feature with several thousand users over recent weeks, receiving positive feedback. One notable trend that emerged was a strong demand for mobile recharges. However, there are some limitations: the BBPS system currently does not support mobile recharges or credit card payments by foreign payers. To address this, Aspora has