TechCircle Interviews Grey.co CEO & Co-founder

As the global workforce becomes increasingly borderless and India emerges as a powerhouse for remote talent and international earnings, fintech innovators are racing to simplify cross-border banking. Among them, Grey, a Y Combinator-backed fintech founded by Nigerian entrepreneurs Idorenyin Obong and Femi Aghedo, stands out for its mission to make international money movement seamless for freelancers, remote professionals, and businesses.

Grey’s recent India launch introduced “Faster Rupee Payouts”, allowing users to withdraw global earnings directly in INR with minimal delay - a move aimed squarely at India’s thriving freelance and tech-talent ecosystem.

In this conversation with TechCircle, Idorenyin Obong, CEO and co-founder of Grey, discusses the company’s India strategy, its technological foundation and how it envisions redefining global financial access across emerging markets.

Interview Questions

Q1. Market Entry - Your India entry comes at a time when the country is both a major recipient of remittances and a key exporter of global digital talent. What made India the next natural step for Grey's expansion into Asia?

India was actually one of the first markets we wanted to launch in. When we started Grey in 2021, I was tracking remittance data obsessively, and India stood out immediately - $125 billion annually, more than any country globally. However, what really caught my attention was speaking with Indian devs who worked for YC startups, earning in USD, yet still waiting days for their money to clear through their local bank accounts.

That felt identical to what I experienced in Nigeria. Same problem, different country.

The numbers tell part of the story: 15 million freelancers, with India's gig sector expected to reach significant scale by 2025. However, the real story is simpler: talented people are often stuck waiting for their own money. A designer in Mumbai invoices a client in London, and the payment takes a week, and they lose 3-7% to fees. That’s the same frustration that made me build Grey.

Over the past three years, we have validated our model in Africa, parts of Asia, and Europe. Now that we have the necessary infrastructure to move quickly, India was not just the logical next step; it has been a market we wanted to enter from the very beginning.

Q2. Product Strategy - Grey's recent feature, "Faster Rupee Payouts," enables near-instant INR withdrawals for Indians earning abroad. How have you adapted the product experience for Indian freelancers, remote workers, and startups while preserving the same global ease of use?

The seven-day wait time kept coming up in every conversation we had with Indian users during our research phase. One freelancer told me she had to borrow money from her parents to pay rent while waiting for her Upwork payment to clear, even though the money had already been withdrawn from her client’s account five days earlier. That’s broken.

Here’s how we fixed it: When you use Grey, you get actual US, UK, and European account IBANs, with real routing numbers and sort codes. So when your client in New York, for example, pays you, they’re sending a domestic US transfer, which settles in 1-2 business days. The money is deposited into your Grey USD account immediately.

The India-specific piece is the local payout speed. Since traditional bank transfers from USD to INR take a while. We partnered with local payment processors to allow direct withdrawals, which get the money into your Indian bank account within a. few minutes of initiating the withdrawal. That’s what we mean by “faster”, compared to the previous week-long wait.

The other piece is transparency. We show you the exact exchange rate we're using before you confirm the transaction. No hidden markup. The fee structure is straightforward: you see what you pay.

Q3. Competitive Edge - With India's fintech market being highly saturated with both domestic and international players, what differentiates Grey's approach from the competition, and what strategies are you deploying to establish a unique presence in this ecosystem?

The real difference is lived experience. Before moving to San Francisco, I personally spent years dealing with these exact problems - standing in line at banks in Lagos, meeting BDC operators in parking lots, losing entire days just to access my own money that I’d earned working remotely. Our competitors have excellent platforms, but they were built by people in the West addressing Western problems. We were built by people in emerging markets, solving problems in emerging markets. That difference matters.

Let me give you a concrete example: When we designed Grey's KYC flow, we built it for users who might have intermittent internet, who might be using a lower-cost Android phone, who might not have a permanent address or utility bill. For other products, their KYC process assumes you have stable broadband and Western-style documentation. Both approaches work - but for different users.

Same thing with banking partnerships. We’ve spent five years learning how to navigate partner banks that sometimes go offline, change their APIs without notice, or have compliance requirements that shift every week. We built redundancy into everything because stability isn’t guaranteed in our markets. That operational knowledge is our moat.

The cross-border payments market is massive and fragmented. There’s plenty of room for multiple winners. We’re not trying to replicate any product for their users. We’re building the product that our competitors can’t easily build because they haven’t experienced what we have.

India’s interesting because it’s sophisticated enough to have great alternatives, but also has the same emerging market constraints we understand deeply. We think we can serve Indian users better precisely because we’ve already solved these problems in more complex environments

Q4. India Roadmap - Within Grey's global roadmap, do you see India primarily as an independent market, a strategic hub for Asia, or a prototype for scaling into other emerging economies?

All three, honestly, and the order matters.

As a standalone market, India is huge. Even if we capture 2-3% of the 15 million freelancers over the next few years, that represents hundreds of thousands of potential users. We’re building significant scale, and India could become one of our largest markets.

But India is also our Asian hub. We learned this model in Kenya, where we launched in 2022 as our East Africa base. From Kenya, we expanded to Uganda and Tanzania, because we understood the regional patterns - similar regulatory frameworks, similar user needs, shared banking infrastructure. India provides us with a similar strategic position for South and Southeast Asia.

The prototype piece is important, too. If we can make this work in India, with the complexity of the Indian banking system, with multiple local currency requirements, we know we can make it work in similar emerging economies. The challenges Indian users face are identical to challenges across emerging Asia: slow remittance rails, high FX costs, and limited access to foreign currency accounts.

Q5. Technology Vision - As a software engineer turned entrepreneur, what core technological values and principles guide your approach to building and maintaining a cross-border platform that remains fast, secure, and scalable across diverse regulatory environments?

I started Grey after building payments infrastructure at Paystack and Yellowcard, where I learned that in emerging markets, your architecture decisions literally determine if you survive. Get them wrong and you’re dead when a banking partner fails. Get them right and you can scale across dozens of countries.

We built Grey on three technical principles.

First, we design for failure**.** In Western markets, you can assume banking APIs work 99.9% of the time. In emerging markets, APIs go down on a weekly basis. Banks change requirements with two days’ notice. Partners sometimes just disappear. So we don’t build for the happy path - we build assuming things will break. Every critical flow has at least two backup partners. When our primary partner goes down, we automatically route traffic to our secondary partner. The user doesn’t even notice. That costs us more in integration work upfront, but it’s how we can maintain high uptime.

Secondly, compliance isn’t an afterthought; it’s embedded in our infrastructure. Operating across multiple regulatory regimes means we should build systems that can adapt to different compliance requirements without compromising speed or user experience. We use a modular architecture, allowing us to integrate market-specific compliance requirements without requiring core system rebuilds.

Lastly, in payments, trust comes from responsiveness. If a user taps “send money” and nothing happens for 3 seconds, they assume it failed and tap again. Now you have duplicate transactions. Security underpins everything, but it’s not just encryption algorithms. It’s transparent communication when something goes wrong, predictable behavior that users can rely on, and respect for the fact that our users are smart enough to understand trade-offs. We’ve designed Grey to be fast, without compromising security or transparency.

Q6. User Focus - With millions of Indian freelancers and remote professionals earning in USD or EUR, how does Grey plan to address their unique challenges around conversion rates, payment delays, and foreign-account access?

These three challenges—conversion rates, payment delays, and foreign account access—are precisely what we built Grey to solve. Let me walk you through what actually happens today versus how it works with Grey.

With traditional options, your US employer sends a wire transfer to your Indian bank account. The payment goes through 2-3 correspondent banks as intermediaries. Each one takes a cut and adds processing time. The wire arrives at your Indian bank several days later, where they apply their exchange rate (typically worse than market rates), and finally, it is credited to your account in rupees. You’re looking at 5-10% in total fees and hidden FX markups, with a 5-7 business day wait.

With Grey, your US client sends a domestic US transfer to your Grey US account. That settles in 1-2 days because it’s treated as a local transfer. The money shows up in your Grey app immediately. You can hold it in USD, EUR, or GBP, or convert to INR whenever you want. We show you the exact exchange rate before you confirm - the mid-market rate with our fee disclosed separately. No hidden markups.

The India-specific innovation is the speed of payouts. Traditional bank transfers from USD to INR can take up to a week. We’ve partnered with payment processors to build integrations, which significantly reduces the wait time to nearly instant.

For most Indian freelancers and remote workers, this is a massive improvement over dealing with traditional banks or waiting a week for international wire transfers. That’s the gap we’re filling.

Q7. Partnership Plans - Are you exploring alliances with Indian banks, fintech enablers, or payment processors to accelerate growth and compliance in this market?

Partnership is absolutely core to our strategy. We learned early that you can’t succeed in emerging markets by trying to build everything yourself.

In Kenya, we partnered with Cellulant as our payments processor to power local payouts. That model worked brilliantly because they understood the Kenyan banking rails better than we ever could. In Europe, we’ve partnered with multiple processors to build redundancy, as in emerging markets, no single partner is reliable enough. We’re taking the same approach in India.

We’re not announcing specific Indian partnerships today, but we’re in active discussions with payment aggregators who can handle INR payouts. Our goal is to have multiple partners live this year, so if one experiences technical issues, we can failover to another instantly. That redundancy is critical.

The Indian fintech ecosystem is sophisticated. We’re not coming in thinking we know better. We’re coming in looking to partner with local companies who can teach us how this market works, and we bring our expertise in cross-border corridors they haven’t focused on. We can’t succeed in India without local partners who know this market better than we do. We’re being deliberate about choosing the right ones, and we’re confident we’ll have strong partnerships in place as we scale here.

Q8. Industry Trends - As you expand from Africa to India, how do you perceive the evolution of fintech in terms of user adoption, regulatory frameworks, and technological innovation across emerging markets compared to more mature, developed economies?

What’s fascinating about fintech in emerging markets is that innovation often occurs here first, then spreads to developed economies, rather than the other way around. India is a perfect example. UPI has processed massive transaction volumes, and M-Pesa in Kenya pioneered mobile money back in 2007.

The pattern we’re seeing is that emerging markets are leapfrogging traditional infrastructure. There was never a ubiquitous credit card infrastructure or extensive branch banking, so these markets went straight to mobile-first, digital-first solutions. That necessity drove innovation.

The other major trend driving our business is the redistribution of talent globally. The best engineers used to cluster in San Francisco. Now you have world-class technical talent in Bengaluru, Nairobi, Manila, earning global rates but living locally. Freelance and remote work revenue in markets like India and the Philippines has grown exponentially over the past few years. That creates massive demand for cross-border financial infrastructure that simply didn’t exist before.

Regulatory frameworks are evolving thoughtfully. Emerging market regulators are often more pragmatic and innovation-friendly than their developed-market counterparts, as they recognize that financial inclusion is a key economic priority, not just a social goal. In India, the RBI sees cross-border payments as critical infrastructure for India’s service exports. That’s a fundamentally different mindset than Western regulators, who tend to view fintech primarily through a risk and consumer protection lens.

User adoption in emerging markets is also faster. That means adoption curves are steeper than in markets where users are more conservative about trying new financial services.

What we’re seeing now is convergence. Emerging markets are adopting the best compliance and security practices from developed markets, while developed markets are learning from the speed and user experience of emerging economies. Grey sits right at that intersection. We bring emerging market operational knowledge, complemented by developed market compliance standards.

Q9. Competitive Landscape - With established players like Wise and Revolut dominating the international payments space, what specific gaps or underserved user needs is Grey targeting that these platforms may have missed or under-prioritized?

The cross-border payments market is massive and highly fragmented, indicating that there’s room for multiple successful companies serving different segments. Even the established players have a relatively small market share of the total addressable market.

Wise and Revolut are phenomenal products. They’ve built excellent platforms that work beautifully for their core users. However, they were primarily built for Western users expanding globally, such as someone in London sending money to Europe or a British expat living in Spain. Grey was built from the ground up for users in emerging markets.

We’re not trying to beat them at what they do best; they’re excellent at serving their core users. We’re serving users who haven’t been fully reached yet. The freelancer in Mumbai or Lagos who faces constraints that Western-built products weren’t designed to handle.

And there are hundreds of millions of these users. The market opportunity is enormous precisely because the current solutions don’t address these specific needs. We’re building a product that these other options can’t easily build because they haven’t experienced what we have. That’s our positioning, not cheaper, not more features, but built from the ground up for emerging market professionals earning globally.

Q10. Founder Vision - You've built Grey across continents, from Nigeria to the US to India. What personal motivation drives you to make Grey a borderless financial brand, and what's your long-term vision for its global presence?

This is deeply personal for me. I’ll tell you the exact moment I decided to build Grey.

It was 2019. I was working remotely for a company in San Francisco, earning a good salary in dollars. On paper, I was doing well. But every single time I got paid, I had to take the entire day off work just to access my own money.

I’d drive to my bank in Lagos, which took 40 minutes, assuming the traffic was good, which it rarely was. I’d queue for an hour to withdraw dollars from my domiciliary account. Then I’d drive to a currency exchange office, which we call a BDC, usually located in a mall or near the road, where a guy would count my cash and give me naira at whatever rate they felt like that day. The whole process took 4-6 hours.

And I was one of the lucky ones. I had a domiciliary account. I knew which BDCs were reliable and wouldn’t scam me. Most people didn’t have those advantages.

I remember sitting in Lagos traffic one day, thinking, “This is insane. I’m a software engineer. I just spent half my day physically moving paper currency around a city to access my own earnings. This is a solved problem in technology. Why doesn’t the solution exist?”

That’s when I texted Femi, my co-founder, who’d had the same experience working remotely for international companies. We spent months researching and talking to our friends in Nigeria, and the same story was repeated everywhere. Talented people, trapped by a financial infrastructure that wasn’t built for them.

The vision for Grey is straightforward: Talent is evenly distributed globally, but opportunity is not. There are brilliant developers in Lagos, exceptional designers in Mumbai, and talented writers in Manila. However, the financial infrastructure has historically been built to serve specific geographies, leaving everyone else to navigate complex and expensive workarounds.

If you can do the work, you should be able to access the pay. Your location shouldn’t matter. The fact that you were born in Nairobi instead of London shouldn’t mean you lose 7% of your income to currency conversion and wait a week for your own money.

We’re growing quickly across 50+ countries, but we won’t be done until we’re serving millions more freelancers, remote workers, students, and entrepreneurs. Until every person earning internationally has access to financial infrastructure that works as globally as they do.

Success for me personally is when I meet someone in Cairo, Kigali, or Paris, and they tell me Grey is just how they access their money, not a special fintech product they’re excited about, but their everyday banking app. When it’s invisible infrastructure that works so well, nobody thinks about it. When geography no longer determines your financial access. That’s when we’ve won.

Closing Remarks

Grey’s India expansion underlines a pivotal shift in global fintech from serving developed markets to empowering emerging ones. As Indian professionals increasingly work and earn across borders, platforms like Grey could redefine how they manage, move, and multiply money. TechCircle thanks Idorenyin Obong for sharing his journey and vision as Grey takes its next bold step in India’s dynamic fintech ecosystem.

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