For many Indian Americans, sending money home isn’t just about remittances, it’s about managing real responsibilities from thousands of miles away. Aspora, a Sequoia-backed fintech used by the Indian diaspora for seamless money transfers to India, is now taking that connection a step further.
The platform is rolling out a new feature that allows non-resident Indians (NRIs) to directly pay household bills back home, whether it’s covering utility payments or recharging mobile plans for family members. This shift turns cross-border transfers into cross-border caregiving, offering a more hands-on way to support loved ones.
Until now, supporting family in India often meant taking the long way around. Users had to first send money to an Indian bank account or rely on someone back home to settle routine expenses. Some tried paying directly using foreign cards, only to run into steep fees, currency conversion hassles, and frequent transaction failures. Aspora’s new feature aims to eliminate that friction, giving NRIs a direct and reliable way to manage essential payments—no intermediaries, no workarounds.
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To make this possible, Aspora has plugged into India’s Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) through Yes Bank’s domestic network. This integration opens access to more than 22,000 billers across the country, covering everything from electricity boards like BSES and BESCOM to broadband and mobile service providers such as Jio and Airtel. It also extends to loan repayments for major banks, allowing NRIs to take care of a wider range of financial responsibilities back home, all from one platform.
What makes the offering more appealing for the diaspora is that Aspora isn’t adding any service fees for these payments, and bills can be paid directly in foreign currency at competitive exchange rates.
“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,” Aspora founder and CEO Parth Garg shared to TechCrunch in a recent phone interview.
According to co-founder Garg, enabling direct bill payments may slightly reduce traditional remittance volumes by an estimated 4% to 5% as some funds will now go straight toward expenses rather than being transferred to bank accounts. But he sees this as an advantage, not a drawback. By letting users handle real financial responsibilities back home, Aspora expects to build stronger engagement and long-term loyalty among the diaspora.
“Today, the goal for any Neo bank is to try to get more and more transactions on your app. 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,” as per Garg.
He added that Aspora has quietly been piloting the feature with a few thousand users over recent weeks, and the early response has been encouraging. One of the strongest use cases to emerge during the trial was mobile recharge, as many users preferred topping up phone plans directly for family members in India. Since BBPS doesn’t cover certain categories such as prepaid mobile recharge or credit card payments for overseas users, Aspora has tied up with global mobile recharge service provider Ding to support those transactions.
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The service is currently available to users in the UK, and Aspora says it will soon expand the feature to customers in the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates—two of the largest hubs for the Indian diaspora.
In June, Aspora secured $50 million in Series B funding at a valuation of $500 million, led by Sequoia with participation from Greylock, Hummingbird, Quantum Light Ventures and Y Combinator. The company entered the U.S. market in July, tapping into the world’s largest source of inward remittances to India, accounting for nearly 28% of all transfers, according to the Reserve Bank of India.
Aspora says it has now onboarded 800,000 customers, facilitated over $4 billion in transactions, and helped users collectively save around $25 million in transfer fees.
Looking ahead, the company plans to offer NRE (non-resident external) accounts to help users manage income earned abroad, and NRO (non-resident ordinary) accounts for income generated in India, giving NRIs a more complete suite of financial tools to bridge their lives across borders.