Forex Startup KlickEx to Launch in India
KlickEx is headed to one of the world’s largest markets.
The currency exchange service KlickEx, which won SWIFT’s Innotribe Startup Challenge in Sept. 2013, has increased its market penetration in the South Pacific, and is looking to enter a number of major new markets in 2015, said UK-based CEO Robert Bell.
Bell, who sat the Founders panel at Bank Innovation 2014, told Bank Innovation that he hopes to launch in India and the subcontinent soon. This is an area with a population well north of 1 billion people, so it is a massive potential market for KlickEx’s service.
The company specializes in making the movement of money between banks fast, cheap, and easy. KlickEx is able to plug into the fastest data pipe a bank may have to allow for the fastest flow of funds.
“Africa and Latin America,” Bell said, “are soon behind” the subcontinent. This movement will bring KlickEx into competition with M-Pesa, the mobile phone-based money movement service from Safaricom that first launched in Kenya in 2007.
Times are good for money movement companies. PeerTransfer and Transferwise have both raised large amounts of money based on massive valuations — the former raised $22 million in January, while the latter received a $1 billion (“unicorn”) valuation around the same time. KlickEx has about $1.3 million in funding so far, and looks to follow down the same path.
“It’s pretty exciting times,” Bell said.
