The London team had done their homework on slides. They knew UPI was transforming payments, they had a market-size chart, and they had a board mandate to enter India. What they didn't have was anyone who had actually tried to close a commercial agreement with an Indian bank as an unknown foreign company. Two conversations with Indian banking partners had ended politely. The real problem, which nobody in London wanted to say, was that the company hadn't decided what it wanted to be in India. A licence holder? A white-label provider? A BaaS layer? They assumed those were all the same path. They're not.
Our consultant's first meeting started with a question the London team hadn't answered internally: what are you actually willing to be here? Three weeks of work, 17 interviews with payment aggregators, banks, and potential channel partners, built a real picture of which entry structure had willing counterparties and which didn't. Three scenarios were modelled across 5 years, stress-tested against two regulatory risk cases that the leadership hadn't been tracking but needed to.
The board selected the BaaS integration route, the most conservative option, but the one with a clear path to a first signed agreement. The India Country Head they hired three months later said the most useful thing the strategy gave her was a sentence she could use with every partner: exactly what the company was in India, and what it wasn't. Fourteen months in, ARR was ₹3.8 Cr against the ₹3.4 Cr Year 1 target. The banking partner signed in month 9, two months ahead of plan.
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