The Money Has to Follow the Goods

An interview with Rohit Taneja by Sean Murphy

Somewhere in India, a merchant makes glassware and fabrics, and wants to sell to customers in the United States. The product is good, and the demand is there.

The problem, as it has always been, is the money. Getting paid across a border turns a simple sale into an ordeal of intermediary banks, foreign currency that the merchant does not know how to receive, and a stack of compliance paperwork that can run to a hundred documents before anything goes live. For Rohit Taneja, founder and chief executive of Decentro, that merchant is the whole story. Making the goods was never the problem. Getting paid for them was, and narrowing that gap is the work his company has spent the past year on.

Rohit did not start in finance. He trained as a hardware engineer and spent two years at Sony in Japan before returning to India around 2015 with a simple idea: solve peer-to-peer payments. The company he built then was modelled on Venmo, the American app that let friends settle debts with a tap, and it was sold in 2017. He stayed with the acquirer for a couple of years, and out of that experience came Decentro, founded in 2020. The pitch is best understood by analogy, and Rohit reaches for the most familiar one in technology as a builder, engineer & innovator at heart.

Just as Amazon Web Services made launching a website as easy as clicking a few buttons, Decentro wants to make launching a financial product almost as simple. It sits in the background as a banking and payments API platform, the verification, accounts and money-movement plumbing that a company integrates in a few calls rather than building bank by bank itself. For our global / deep fintech readers, Decentro is basically like ‘Plaid for India’.

The scale of what sits in that background is easy to underestimate from outside India. When a super app such as Paytm extends a credit line to a small shopkeeper, it must first verify the merchant's tax identity, confirm the business qualifies as a small enterprise, and check the director's personal credentials. Those verifications are exactly the kind of plumbing Decentro provides. Rohit estimates that fifty to sixty million people in India are already using his company without knowing it, because it works behind the scenes in many of the apps they touch every day. It is a striking figure, and it speaks to how much of modern finance now runs on infrastructure the customer never sees.

What pushed Decentro towards the border was a pattern its founder kept noticing in his domestic business. As a payment aggregator processing large volumes at home, the company served e-commerce sellers, lenders and fintechs, and many of those sellers wanted to reach buyers abroad.

The logistics of shipping were somebody else's problem. The payments were Decentro's. And here Rohit offers a useful corrective to the European reflex of simply accepting card fees as a cost of doing business. In India, he explains, cards never became the habit they are in the West. Merchants and consumers gravitated instead to UPI, the country's real-time bank-to-bank rails, where a transaction might cost a tenth of a percent against the two and a half percent of an average credit card. Once you are used to paying almost nothing, paying the card networks to move money internationally starts to look absurd.

That difference in expectation created an opening. If the card networks are expensive and slow, the alternative is to bypass them and remit money directly. The merchant needs a single clean view of his money, fast onboarding rather than a deluge of forms, and someone in the middle to handle the currency and the compliance. Global gateways such as Stripe and PayPal address parts of this, but Rohit saw room for a player that could settle faster, onboard in less time, and offer better commercials. The question was how to do it within a legal structure that actually permitted what he wanted to build.

The answer arrived in the form of a new licence. Decentro became one of only a handful of companies in India to secure a Payment Service Provider authorisation from the regulator at GIFT City, the offshore financial zone India has carved out in one corner of the country and modelled, quite deliberately, on established centres such as Singapore and Dubai's DIFC. The company has described itself as the first India based payment aggregator to hit the final approval under this new regime. The licence is recent, introduced only a couple of years ago, and Rohit is definitely excited to have been an early adopter and is grateful to the vision being shown by IFSCA & Indian regulators.

What the license unlocks is best understood as two freedoms. The first is geographic. Under its older domestic licence, Decentro could only onboard merchants with an entity inside India. The new authorisation lets it onboard a company almost anywhere that is not sanctioned, from Singapore to Lithuania, provided the jurisdiction is clean by international standards. The second freedom is monetary. Where the company could once handle only Indian rupees, it can now hold and settle in multiple currencies, letting a merchant collect in dollars or euros and store money in that currency. "Earn in USD, keep it in USD, pay in USD," as Taneja puts it, and only convert when you actually choose to. For a business running a long chain of cross-border transactions, those saved foreign exchange charges add up.

Ask him where this is heading and his answer ranges well beyond merchant payments. He points to Indians buying US stocks in growing numbers, to a subscription economy spreading from the big cities into smaller towns, and to structured finance such as home loans moving from a three month bank ordeal to a thirty day digital process. Trade finance, where Indian lenders increasingly fund the gap between an invoice and its payment, is the use case he seems most animated by. Each is, at bottom, a cross-border money movement problem, and each is the kind of thing the old card based plumbing handles badly.

It is early, and Taneja is careful to say so. The global business is new and there is a great deal still to build. But return to the glassware merchant for a moment. For years his ambition outran the financial pipes available to him, and the cost of getting paid ate into the margin on everything he made. The licence Decentro now holds does not change what he produces. It changes whether the money can follow the goods without losing itself along the way, and in a world where so much trade is still waiting on infrastructure to catch up,

that may be the revolution worth watching.