Grab's R&d In India Aligns Efforts With Strategic Focus Areas

Southeast Asia’s ridehailing major and Online to Offline (O2O) mobile platform, Grab has an ambitious mission of enabling 100 million micro-entrepreneurs in South-East Asia within the next two years. Grab’s Bangalore R&D center, which played a crucial role in building the payment and financial services solutions for the platform is now expanding its scopes to newer areas such as mapping, transport, security and data engineering etc. and building strong teams to work on those areas as well. Vikas Agrawal, CTO, and Head of Engineering at Grab Financial Group shares more details on the work being done by the India R&D teams, and the tech talents they are looking to tap for further expansion.

- 

Could you tell us about the areas that India r&d center is focusing on?

Bangalore is one of the important global fintech hubs, and hence having an R&D center here

has allowed us to leverage the deep bench of tech talent that is available locally. The software engineers have deep knowledge of new mobile-first technologies and experience in developing new payments solutions.

A major part of the team in Bangalore is focused on developing solutions for Grab Financial Group. We have developed an E-wallet for South-East Asian region that is allowing users to make cashless payments in a safe and convenient way. The payment data insights have also enabled us to serve the unbanked population better. For example, we can now offer our driver and merchants partners lending and insurance services based on the data on their spending patterns.