Uber strengthens its India Fintech presence with Uber Money team

The Uber Money team, based in the firm's Hyderabad Tech Centre, is the first such across the Asia Pacific region and will contribute to Uber's global financial and technology innovations

Ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies on Tuesday said it has set up Uber Money, a team of more than 100 technology professionals responsible for global financial products and technology innovations, at its Hyderabad Tech Centre, making it the first such commitment in the Asia-Pacific region.

The team will play an essential role in enabling upcoming new global features and improvements, including real-time earnings, updated debit accounts, and debit cards for Uber drivers, along with Uber Wallet and refreshed Uber credit card for Uber riders.  

With deep knowledge in front-end, full-stack, mobile, machine learning, and data engineering, the firm said the team will focus on implementing new payment methods, enabling and building financial compliance tools. 

The company also said it would leverage smart routing technologies for payment gateways, and apply Uber Artificial Intelligence models for intelligent risk decisions.

“The Uber Hyderabad Tech Centre has the best-in-class fintech talent specializing in risk, payments, financial reporting and analytics platform engineering,” said Naga Kasu, engineering director and Hyderabad site lead, Uber. 

“Besides engineering, we are investing in growing and scaling data science, analytics, and product management organizations to transform Hyderabad into a full spectrum tech site for Uber,” he added. The overall transaction value in the Indian fintech market is estimated to jump from nearly $66.1 billion in 2019 to $137.8 billion in 2023, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 20.18 per cent, according to a report by PwC and industry body Assocham. 

Emerging markets are leading the way, with both China and India recording 87 per cent fintech adoption rate in 2019, significantly higher than the global average rate of 64 per cent, according to EY’s Global FinTech Adoption Index 2019.

Uber’s Bengaluru-based rival Ola is also increasing its focus on the fintech market. Ola Financial Services (OlaMoney) offers a host of financial solutions ranging from the OlaMoney wallet to post-paid services and micro-insurance for rides taken on the platform to a one-of-a-kind health insurance solution. 

The homegrown company had said it is India’s largest private micro-insurance platform and largest provider of post-paid services. 

The company had said OlaMoney was working towards building products that are simple, accessible and have a positive impact on the lives of both its customers and driver-partners.