BookMyForex to build dedicated platform for corporates

BookMyForex, an online forex marketplace, will come up with a dedicated platform for corporates this year as part of its expansion plans, its Founder and CEO Sudarshan Motwani said.

This online forex marketplace, which caters to as many as 650 cities, is eyeing volume run-rate of $2-3 billion by 2021, Motwani told BusinessLine .

BookMyForex offers door-to-door delivery in over 183 cities with cash-on-delivery limit of up to ₹50,000.

“Our proposed corporate model will also be online. We are creating a platform where anybody in a corporate can apply for foreign exchange and there will be an administrator and the entire process will be automated. We are a fin-tech and automation will be at the core of whatever we do,” Motwani said.

In the current fiscal, BookMyForex is looking to process about ₹1,200 crore and is already growing at 10-20X, he said.

In recent years, the Indian forex market has been growing at a compounded annual rate of 15 per cent. “People are getting more confident about buying forex online,” he said.

Motwani said that BookMyForex will look to “white-label” its cards in the coming days. For the current fiscal, the platform is looking at a run-rate of $100 million in forex cards.

“We have grown in cards at an amazing rate. It is almost 600 per cent. We push about 6,000-7,000 cards every month. We had created the whole idea that ordinary customers — not corporates alone — can buy forex cards,” he said.

Cash is still king in India, Motwani said, adding that card purchases was valued at only $2.8 billion out of the nearly $17 billion that Indians carry abroad every year.

“People’s foreign travel has definitely increased. Our whole marketing is now focussed on managing people’s desire,” Motwani said.

The total addressable market for forex in India is about $44 billion.

Motwani said that BookMyForex will continue to be focussed on being an online service provider.

“We have no intent of being an offline player. We don’t believe anybody can be in both online as well as offline. It’s a serious mistake if any offline player has started doing online. Actually, in our industry many are doing this,” Motwani said.

As on date, as much as 30 per cent of total business of BookMyForex comes through online channel. Every day about 15,000 visitors come to the website and, thereby, create leads to about 2,500 more people, he said.

Besides coming up with a corporate-focussed platform, BookMyForex, which has three lakh customers, will also look to scale up its B2B2C model.

Till now, the platform was only concentrating on the B2C model.