unocoin and the problem money can't solve alone
a global remittance play meets an Indian tax problem. the lesson: scale isn't about capacity—it's about friction.
spent the morning on a technical call about FX transfers.
the problem was a partnership between an Indian exchange and a global payment company. They could move money at live rates. They had the infrastructure. They had the capital.
what they had was a tax code.
India requires withholding on international transfers (TDS). When a customer sends $1000 out of India, the government takes $100 off the top and promises to return it at year-end through a tax credit system.
competitors had found a way around it: use XE's rates. Market standard. Transparent.
but this team had added extra fees on top. Platform fee. GST. Total cost was 35 basis points higher than the competition.
the customer didn't care that they'd get their TDS back at year-end. Most customers aren't CTAs. They see the government taking $100 and think: "I just lost $100."
so they went with the competitor.
the call lasted an hour. The solution wasn't capital. It wasn't engineering. It was UX.
Build a dashboard that showed the customer their TDS accumulation. Show them it comes back. Send them notifications. Make the invisible visible.
$0 to implement. Changed the game.
the lesson: the biggest friction in your business isn't always technical.
sometimes it's narrative. Sometimes it's trust. Sometimes it's just that your customer doesn't understand they're not losing money—they're deferring it.
that's a UX problem, not an engineering problem. And UX problems scale much faster than technical debt.