HDFC Bank, India’s leading private sector bank, has announced the launch of its EdFinTech platform at the Global Fintech Fest 2024 in Mumbai. This platform will serve as a payment gateway for students seeking education abroad and help digitize international education remittance payments that are currently funded offline through overseas transfers.
As part of this initiative, HDFC Bank will partner with educational consultants/aggregators to enable students to send money abroad to universities. The solution will assist in smoothly enabling these partners/consultants to offer the convenience of digital payments and ensure compliance with extant RBI guidelines via the HDFC Bank EdFinTech platform connection, thereby providing convenience to students and reducing payment drop-offs.
Speaking on the occasion, Jatinder Gupta, Business Head and EVP – Retail Trade and Forex, HDFC Bank said:
We are excited to launch our new EdFintech platform – a payments solution for students aspiring to pursue their education dreams abroad. This will help make the journey quicker and smoother. The offering from HDFC Bank is a testament to our unwavering commitment to customer centricity and our dedication to evolve alongside changing customer expectations, making you, our customers, feel valued and important.
With this, HDFC Bank is looking to cash in on the growing number of Indian students going overseas for education. Additionally, the platform will bring unorganized players under its umbrella and monetize its services.
According to an estimate by the Ministry of External Affairs, over 13 lakh Indian students are expected to go abroad for educational purposes. Together, all the Indian Banks handle transactions worth about $3.5 billion, which is 11 percent of total Liberalised Remittance Services. This segment of Education consultants and aggregators holds immense growth potential, offering a complete suite of services and handholding a large number of students seeking to study overseas.
The bank has forayed into the overseas education segment, peppered with new-age tech companies. The rise of tech-based solutions to streamline overseas education processes has spawned startups such as Athena Education, ASL, and AdmitKard, among others.
