How Xare is disrupting the way we share money

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 how much they would disrupt the sharing economy with their innovative idea to transform smart money management and financial inclusion around the world.

The Dubai-based startup began as a platform that allowed foreign workers to eliminate the cost of remittances by sharing real-time access to their bank accounts and credit cards with family and friends.

The multipurpose app Xare (pronounced part) allows users to set daily or monthly limits for recipients, give short-term loans via credit card, create expense accounts for colleagues or send pocket money to the children without seeing the details of accounts.

“This idea of ​​moving money around to empower your family to spend hasn’t really evolved in the digital era,” says Gupta, who is also CEO of the company, which she co-founded with chief product officer Milind Singh and chief technology officer. Mandeep Singh.

“So we’re actually disrupting transfers. By removing this need to move money and essentially just sharing the spending capacity, we’ve created this global disruption to money transfers – we’re instant, you don’t have to keep checking back to see if the money reached , 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 around the world using a credit or debit card that has been shared by a family member or friend who can enter a spending limit without revealing the card details.

It has also introduced the “card-pooling” app XareClub, where users invite friends and family to “club together” their cards to collectively take advantage of bank offers and discounts they wouldn’t normally have access to.

So far, more than 15,000 “clubs” have been created on the XareClub app.

In just two years, Xare has grown to more than 2 million users in over 180 countries, with around $2 billion shared on the platform to date, says Gupta.

“I had a gut feeling that we had the numbers [to make Xare succeed] but we did not expect it to be so much, so quickly, says the former banker.

“We’ve worked a lot to make it happen, and that kind of exponential growth is hard to come by.”

The global acceleration of FinTech and digital payment solutions since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic has unlocked new financial opportunities for millions of people who previously had no 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 from the GSM Association, the trade body representing mobile network operators.

“Mobile money continues to grow rapidly, bringing a range of financial products to the fingertips of hundreds of millions of users and disrupting traditional financial services,” the GSM Association said in the report.

Meanwhile, around 22 percent of the GCC’s population is unbanked, compared with 60 percent in North Africa, according to a report by consultancy Strategy&.

Seventy-nine percent of young adults in the Mena region are unbanked and 72 percent of the poorest residents could benefit from financial inclusion, according to the Arab Monetary Fund.

See: Best apps to transfer money in UAE

Most financial services are set up for income earners despite the fact that two-thirds of the world depends on other people’s wages, which represents about $25 trillion spent this way, according to Gupta.

“These income earners are trying to figure out ‘how am I going to get that money to people who depend on me,'” she says.

“One of the reasons we feel Xare is really great is the connections between the person earning the income and the people who want to use it.”

Ms Gupta and her co-founders started 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 Dubai International Financial Centre.

Aside from adding new features to Xare, the founders established an office in Silicon Valley in December, in an effort to expand the North American market.

It also bought Bengaluru startup Rive for an undisclosed amount in January to use India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which the Indian government opened to non-resident Indians, foreign tourists and business travelers in January, 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 no merchant fees.

“The expansion will be about building more at Rive [and] build more on XareClub, build more on Xare in general to meet the needs of the two-thirds of the world that need more financial services covered, says Gupta.

Q&A with Padmini Gupta, CEO and Co-Founder of Xare

What other successful startup do you wish you had started?

There are so many inspiring start-ups out there. From ambitious, bold, industry-changing ideas like Airbnb to SpaceX that came out of the blue and disrupted space technology in unimaginable ways. I have also always admired CashApp for how it has carved out a place in a cluttered, competitive US market purely by word of mouth and by always putting the customer first.

Who is your role model?

I have followed closely the career of the American politician, Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as speaker of the US House of Representatives. She is such a strong personality and a powerful voice for women’s rights and it is amazing how she leads from the front.

My biggest inspiration has been my parents, who were among the first Indian residents in Dubai and then went on to build a successful manufacturing business here. I admire them for how they found their footing in a new country and have given back so much to society ever since.

What new skills have you learned since starting your business?

Building a business is a labor of love – I’ve built Xare brick by brick in a very dynamic payments industry by innovating and using our strong technology capabilities. By understanding what customers need and making data-driven decisions, I have learned to keep Xare at the forefront.

Where do you want to be in five years?

Over the next five years, I want to lead Xare as it enables greater inclusion in the financial system through shared access. I want to see Xare empowering the two thirds of the world that do not earn an income and are financially dependent on the one third of the world that does. We are committed to changing the way people can access and use financial resources around the world. And we will continue to work relentlessly towards our goal.

If you could do everything differently, what would you change?

Nothing at all. I am proud of how Xare has shaped itself and exceeded all expectations in every way. Xare disrupted the payments scene at a very crucial time – in the post-Covid era when people simply wanted more control over their money. They moved away from cash which is difficult to handle. They used strict discretion and began to rely more on shared resources. We are happy that we could offer them an elegant solution and find the way to success.

Updated: 27 March 2023 at 03.30