As a first such initiation in Asia-Pacific region, Uber is planning to set up a global fintech team in Hyderabad, which will be consisted of 100 members of technology professionals. They already have their Global financial services and products team situated in San Francisco, New York, Amsterdam, and Palo Alto. The company has said that the reason behind setting up this team is to work on improvements and global features from updating debit accounts and debit cards for drivers, real-time earnings to wallet and credit card offering for riders.

According to Uber, drivers will be able to easily track their earning and spending history through this digital wallet. While it will also move and manage their money efficiently, it will deliver new Uber Financial products which can be accessed through Uber’s driver app as well.  If we talk about their team in Hyderabad, they will bring expertise across mobile development, front-end, machine learning, full-stack, and data engineering. The team will be focused on implementing new payment methods, leveraging smart routing technologies for payment gateways, applying AI-based models for intelligent risk decisions which are related to corrupt user profiles and accounts, and enabling and building financial compliance tool.

“The Uber Hyderabad Tech Centre has the best in class fintech talent specialising in risk, payments, financial reporting and analytics platform engineering. Besides engineering, we are investing in growing and scaling data science, analytics, and product management organizations to transform Hyderabad into a full spectrum tech site for Uber," said Naga Kasu, engineering director and Hyderabad site lead, Uber.

However, if we look at Indian market, many industry experts think UBER to be quite late in delivering its financial services, as many companies have already taken a strong hold of the market. If we talk about competition, Uber’s biggest rival Ola are also magnifying its focus on fintech market with its OlaMoney which offers a range of financial solutions across post-paid services, micro-insurance for rides taken on a platform, and health insurance solution, among others.