THE MAN WHO BUILT THE MONEY MACHINE – TravelBiz Monitor: India travel news, travel trends, tourism

By Palak Shah, BW BusinessWorld

EbixCash World Money sells foreign currency. If your daughter is starting at a university in Melbourne, this is one of the companies that gets the fees there. A hundred branches across seventy-odd cities. Counters at more than twenty international airports. Three million customers. It is one of the marquee names in Indian money-changing — the counter you walk past at Delhi, Mumbai Terminal 2, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, the forex desk sitting inside the offices of some of the country’s largest companies, the panel a few hundred thousand parents pay foreign university bills through.

On the morning of 14 July 2026 it found its name in the newspapers under the word “betting.”

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had arrested a Delhi businessman called Vikas Garg in the Mahadev Online Book money-laundering investigation. Garg was chairman of the Ebix group. The headlines said Ebix. And in a hundred branches of EbixCash World Money across seventy cities, staff who had never heard of the Mahadev Online Book began taking calls from customers asking whether their money was safe. EbixCash World Money does not appear once in the eighty-eight pages the ED has filed. It appears only in every headline.

The betting money never once touched an EbixCash World Money counter. Yet, the stigma walked in through the front door – because it had the same surname.

Here is how the name got there.

The money began, if the agency has it right, on an illegal betting app run out of Chhattisgarh. From there it went to a Kolkata operator who turns cash into bank entries, then into offshore funds registered in places nobody visits, then into the accounts of Vikas Garg’s listed companies in Delhi. In the summer of 2024 some ₹292 crore of it left an ICICI branch, crossed the Atlantic, and at a bankruptcy auction in the state of Georgia bought an American software company called Ebix, Inc.

Ebix, Inc. owned about twenty-five companies in India.

EbixCash World Money was one of them.

That is the whole of the connection. Not a transaction, not an account, not an employee — a shareholding four layers overhead, acquired twenty-six years after the business opened its first branch and six years after it had already been sold to somebody else.

The Enforcement Directorate’s attachment order in the case runs to eighty-eight pages. It does not mention EbixCash World Money once.

And seven days after Garg was arrested, the Reserve Bank of India gave the company the biggest licence of its life.

The distinction is simple and it is the whole story. The ED’s case is against Vikas Garg and entities linked to him. Nowhere in it is EbixCash World Money alleged to have run, funded or profited from the betting operation.
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THE BUILDER

The man who built it is called T.C. Guruprasad, and he has never owned a share of it. Neither has anyone else who works there.

In 1998 a Mumbai financial-services house called the Centrum group decided it wanted a foreign-exchange arm and went looking for somebody to build one. It found a young dealer three years into the forex division of LKP Merchant Finance, and gave him a room above a garage on Richmond Road in Bangalore, a money-changer’s licence, and a brief closer to a dare than a strategy: build the business.

Guruprasad hired two men, Biswajit Dutta and Parag Bhatt. The first transaction cleared in 1999, for one thousand US dollars. Among the earliest clients were Tata BP Solar and Mphasis, then still trading as BFL — Bangalore companies with staff who needed to get on planes.

Dutta and Bhatt still work there. Hold that thought for twenty-eight years.

He built it the slow way, which is the only way this business can be built. Open a branch. Use the branch to justify the next licence. Use the licence to sign a corporate client and put a forex desk inside the client’s own office — an implant, in the trade. Use the corporate to reach the hotel next door, the hotel to reach the tour operator, and then bid for a counter at the airport, because the airport is where the traveller actually is.

Then move to the next city.

He gave an interview to Business Standard in May 2007 that is still the best record of the thing being assembled, and there is no vision in it anywhere. There is a man counting branches: thirty-three at the end of June 2006, fifty-four wanted by the following June, thirty-two implants running and seventy-five planned.

The turn came in 2008, when the company stopped being a shop.

Until then it held a Full Fledged Money Changer’s licence, which permits exactly one thing — selling currency notes to a traveller across a counter. The upgrade to Authorised Dealer Category-II let it move money for a reason: a daughter’s first semester in Melbourne, a father’s surgery in Singapore, an emigration lawyer’s fee in Toronto. Every one of those obliges the company to know why the money is moving, code it correctly under the Reserve Bank’s purpose-code rules, keep the paperwork, and produce all of it when an inspector asks.

The company says it was the first money changer in India to make that jump. The classification itself is on the record in CARE Ratings’ reports.

More permissions followed. Inward remittances in 2011. Exclusive airport counters at Chennai in 2013; Bengaluru, Mumbai Terminal 2 and Tiruchirappalli in 2014; seven more airports in 2015. An online order book the same year. Every one of them granted by the Reserve Bank to a company it had been inspecting since 1999.

Then Guruprasad sold it, and stayed.

In 2017 Centrum sold 18.5 per cent to a private-equity group — Jacob Ballas, New York Life, Evolvence. In 2018 the Nasdaq-listed American software company Ebix, Inc. bought the whole thing for about USD 175 million. In its filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Ebix called it the undisputed leader in Indian foreign exchange and outward remittance, which is a buyer’s description of its own purchase and should be read that way. What it was buying is in Centrum’s own release: 165 outlets in 55 cities, 24 airports, roughly ₹10,000 crore of transactions in a year, three million customers.

Guruprasad kept running it. Ebix said the senior team would stay, and it did. He opened the hundredth branch in December 2025, in Tiruvannamalai — a temple town in northern Tamil Nadu with no airport, no IT park and no visa queue, but a thousand-year-old shrine at the foot of a hill and the small foreign economy that grows around one.

An Assistant Superintendent of Police cut the ribbon.

“It demonstrates,” Guruprasad said, “the faith that our clients have in us.”

Six months later, the company he said it about would be in the newspapers under the word “betting.”
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THE BUYER

Ebix U.S. collapsed in December 2023.

The cause was American. The company had spent most of its life selling insurance software, then leveraged itself hard from 2017 to assemble an Indian payments platform — ItzCash, CentrumDirect, Weizmann and Essel Forex — and defaulted on a USD 617 million credit facility. Short-sellers had circled. The lenders moved. Chapter 11, in a bankruptcy court in Atlanta.

The Indian operating companies sat outside the debtor group and traded straight through it. Nine months later, on 30 August 2024, the reorganisation took effect, the old Ebix equity was cancelled, and an Indian consortium fronted by a listed company called Eraaya Lifespaces took control. The plan that cancelled the old Ebix equity did not only wipe out shareholders in America. Guruprasad and his senior team had held stock options in the parent — around ten per cent, on the company’s account. They went with everything else. The same transaction that installed the new owner erased the only stake the builders had ever been given. Despite this, Guruprasad held the fort.

The chairman of Eraaya Lifespaces was Vikas Garg. Eraaya paid about ₹1,175 crore — USD 138.577 million — for 97.58 per cent of Ebix, Inc.

What came with that were roughly twenty-five Indian companies Garg had never run, staffed by people he had never met, holding licences he had not applied for. Among them, in Bangalore, a forex business then in its twenty-sixth year.

The Enforcement Directorate says the money he paid with was dirty.
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Its case is set out in Provisional Attachment Order No. 16 of 2026 — eighty-eight pages, issued in June from the agency’s zonal office beside the Netaji Subhash Stadium in Raipur, over the signature of a deputy director named Varun Singhal.

It begins with Hari Shankar Tibrewal, whom the ED describes as the operator of an illegal betting platform called Skyexchange, a sister to the Mahadev Online Book in which one of Mahadev’s promoters had also invested. From Tibrewal, the order says, money reached Vikas Garg by two routes.

The first was cash. A Kolkata accommodation-entry operator named Amit Saraogi arranged bank entries against about ₹525 crore in cash — a figure the order says he admitted himself — and roughly ₹175 crore of it landed in accounts of companies connected to Garg.

The second was dressed better. Offshore entities, which the order calls conduit investment vehicles, pushed some ₹765.77 crore into Garg’s listed companies through qualified institutional placements, foreign portfolio investment, FDI and convertible bonds. The bond route, the ED says, was built specifically to make betting money look like foreign investment.

₹175 crore and ₹765.77 crore. That is the ₹940.77 crore the agency attached.

Then the order tracks the last hop with a bank statement. ICICI account 135805002396, in the name of Vikas Lifecare Ltd. Between 13 June and 29 July 2024 it wired ₹292.41 crore to a beneficiary the narration records as EBIX INC.

Kolkata cash and offshore funds into Delhi companies, out of an ICICI account, across an ocean, into shares bought at a bankruptcy auction in Georgia.

At no point in that journey did the money touch a counter in Bangalore, or Kochi, or Tiruvannamalai. It went over the top of them and out of the country.
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What the ED seized says the same thing more plainly. Schedule A of the order attaches Eraaya’s shareholding in Ebix, Inc. — 74.86 per cent of the American company, worth ₹893 crore. Schedule B attaches twelve properties worth ₹47.73 crore: a house in Saligao in North Goa, a building in Nainital, a flat in the Amaryllis in his daughter’s name, an apartment on Shivaji Marg, a shop on the G.T. Road in Shahdara.

Shares in an American company, and a family’s real estate. That is the whole attachment.

Across all eighty-eight pages the order never mentions EbixCash World Money. It never mentions Ebix Payment Services. The words foreign exchange, money changer, authorised dealer and Reserve Bank of India do not appear anywhere in it. Neither does T.C. Guruprasad, or any other executive who runs the business.

The bank accounts the agency dissected belong to Advik Capital, GG Engineering, Teamo Productions, Vikas Ecotech, Vikas Lifecare, Sylph Technologies and Eraaya itself — not one account of any Ebix operating company in India.

No branch was sealed. No counter was attached. No licence was touched.

One line does reach downward: the order tells the managing director of Ebix, Inc. not to sell or encumber the assets of the company and its subsidiaries up to the ₹893 crore attached. That restrains a shareholder from disposing of things. It does not stop a single transaction from clearing.

What the Enforcement Directorate alleges against Vikas Garg is a shareholding, not an operation. Its case is that betting money bought shares — shares in an American company, at an auction in Georgia, in August 2024.

Nothing in its eighty-eight pages alleges that the betting business ran through EbixCash World Money’s counters, or that its branches moved a rupee of the syndicate’s money, or that anybody who works there knew, helped or gained. Every account the agency traced belongs to Garg’s own listed vehicles. Every rupee it followed was on its way out of India, not through a branch in it. Garg’s relationship with the company Guruprasad built began and ended on a share register.

Nothing here has been tested. No court has recorded a finding against Vikas Garg, who is entitled to the presumption of innocence. Everything above is what the Enforcement Directorate alleges.

On 14 July 2026 it arrested him. A court in Raipur granted ten days’ custody.
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SEVEN DAYS

T.C. Guruprasad found out from the news.

Nobody rang. There was no call from the group, no warning from Delhi. On the morning of 14 July the man who had spent twenty-eight years building the company learned that its chairman had been arrested the same way everyone else did.

The same day, the chief compliance officer, Himanshu Pramanick, called an emergency meeting — the chief financial officers, the chief business officers, the managing director, the senior payments team, assembled at speed on the worst day the company had ever had.

There were two items on the agenda.

Go to the Reserve Bank of India, before being asked, and explain the structural separation between the promoter and the operating company. Then tell the clients, the bankers and the partners the same thing.

That is the entire list.

What Guruprasad said to his staff was what went to the regulator and to the correspondent banks, in the same words: this concerns the promoter level; it is operationally distinct from us. He was asked afterwards whether he had considered resigning. “Never,” he said, and then explained why — “About two and a half thousand people work for this company,” and he said he owed them and their families more than that.

Twenty-eight years earlier he had hired two of them.
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Then, on 21 July, the Reserve Bank approved an expanded, perpetual Authorised Dealer Category-II licence for EbixCash World Money: trade remittances up to ₹25 lakh a transaction, family maintenance transfers, and Nostro accounts to settle directly with the world. No non-bank institution in India had ever held that combination. The company announced it on the 22nd.

Seven days from the arrest.

Licence approvals are not decided in a week, and this file had been moving through the RBI for months, after the foreign-exchange rules were revised in May. The central bank has drawn no public link between the two events and will not.

But look at what was sitting on the file by 21 July. The attachment order was six weeks old. It had been served on the Adjudicating Authority in Delhi and on the managing director of Ebix, Inc. It had been reported. The chairman of the group was in custody in Raipur. Every reason a supervisor might have to wait — defer pending clarity, let the dust settle — was there.

The institution that has been inspecting this company’s KYC files and purpose codes and Nostro flows since 1999 signed anyway.
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The company had been here before, and knows exactly what a headline costs.

When Ebix filed for bankruptcy in 2023, no customer in India lost a rupee. Behind the counter it was different. Banks turned cold on raising working-capital limits, during the process and after it. International expansion that was on the table had to be abandoned. Capital spending was deferred. People it wanted to hire would not come, because of a word attached to a parent eight thousand miles away. Clients walked away mid-onboarding. Some corporates paused.

July 2026 was a shorter version of the same thing. Several institutional counterparties stepped back for a few days while they ran their own compliance reviews; the company says they were back within a week. Business volumes dipped and were back to normal, it says, from the first week of August — about three weeks.

Everything else held. Every airport concession continued — the Airports Authority at Chennai, Amritsar, Trichy, Calicut, Bhubaneswar, Ranchi and Goa; Adani at Mumbai, Trivandrum, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Mangalore, Lucknow and Guwahati; GMR at Hyderabad, Nagpur and Delhi; Cochin and Kannur. Not one integrity clause was triggered. Western Union, Ria and MoneyGram carried on. So did the university payment panels and the education-loan partners, which means no student’s fee was interrupted anywhere.

The board he reports to is not a promoter’s board. C.S. Murty spent four decades in banking and retired as a Deputy General Manager of the State Bank of India. Sumit Khadria, the chief financial officer, was a partner at EY India for twelve years. These are people whose reputations are portable and personally at stake — the kind who leave when a licence starts to look unsafe.

Inside, nobody left. The board is intact and so is the core team. The statutory auditor has issued no qualification and no emphasis of matter, and has not resigned. No independent director has raised a governance concern. Pramanick went on reporting to the same board he always reported to. And the Reserve Bank’s supervisory contact, the company says, did not change at all — no extra queries, no increased frequency, across all three of its licences — foreign exchange, money transfer and prepaid payments.

That last claim is the company’s own, and the RBI has not contradicted it.

None of which makes the machine healthy. Revenue peaked at ₹732 crore in FY2023-24 and has slipped every year since. The EBITDA margin has gone from 18 per cent in FY2021-22 to 4 per cent in FY2025-26, and that decline began well before anybody was arrested. Some of it is competition — banks taking remittance business in-house, digital players cutting spreads. And some of it, on the company’s own account, is what happens when your owner spends two years in a bankruptcy court and your bank will not raise your limit.

Either way, the damage came from upstairs.
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WHAT THE MACHINE TOUCHES

Somewhere in India this morning, a father is pushing a form across a counter to pay his daughter’s first semester in Melbourne. In Kochi a family is collecting money a son has sent home from Muscat. At Terminal 2 in Mumbai a man late for his flight is buying euros he will mostly bring back unspent. Outside Latur, a woman of seventy is climbing onto a state transport bus.

Four people who will never meet, and one machine.

The last of them is the newest limb of it, and the strangest. It is a bus ticket.

The Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation runs more than sixteen thousand buses and carries over thirteen crore passenger journeys a month, which makes it one of the largest movements of people on earth that nobody outside Maharashtra has heard of. In 2022, Ebix Technologies won the contract to supply and maintain 38,622 Android ticketing machines for that fleet. About 220 crore tickets have gone through them since.

In July 2025, with NSDL Payments Bank, the same company won a ₹140 crore contract to run a statewide National Common Mobility Card programme — written specifically for concession passengers. Students. Senior citizens. Women travelling under the state’s fare-concession scheme. Persons with disabilities. Identity-linked verification, RuPay tap-and-go, distribution through three thousand outlets and every depot in the state.

It launched on 1 April 2026. By 12 August, registrations had crossed one crore and nearly sixty-six lakh cards were active.

So: the woman outside Latur, six in the morning, a cloth bag on her shoulder. She taps her card against the conductor’s handheld. The handheld reads her identity, checks her entitlement, applies the concession her state has granted her and settles the fare somewhere she will never think about. Under two seconds. She sits down.

She has never heard of Skyexchange. She could not tell you what an Authorised Dealer Category-II licence is, or who Vikas Garg is, or where Raipur is in relation to a bankruptcy court in Atlanta.

She is one of a crore of people whose ride to work now runs on payments infrastructure sitting three layers below a money-laundering investigation. The bus pulls out and nobody on it knows any of this, which is how infrastructure is supposed to work. You find out it was there when it stops.
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THE QUESTION

None of this is over. Attachment under the money-laundering act can ripen into confiscation.

And look at what has been attached. Not a flat in Kishan Ganj. Seventy-five per cent of the shareholding of Ebix, Inc. — which, on Garg’s own account to the agency, has roughly twenty-five subsidiary companies in India.

One of them holds the licence.

If a court eventually confirms that the money which bought this structure was betting money, the property that vests in the Government of India is the parent of an RBI-licensed authorised dealer and of the contractor running Maharashtra’s concession-card programme.

Then what? Does a licence survive a change of control nobody applied for? Does the Reserve Bank’s fit-and-proper test apply to a government that acquired the shares by operation of law? Who answers to the woman in Latur if the machine on the conductor’s shoulder stops reading her card one morning?

Nobody knows. India has spent thirty years licensing non-bank institutions to move money that matters — a student’s fees, a migrant’s remittance, a pensioner’s bus fare — and has written no rule at all for what happens to those licences when the people who bought the holding company turn out to be under criminal investigation. For banks the framework exists and has been used: Yes Bank, PMC, RBL. For a money changer moving a family’s education remittances, there is nothing.

What there is instead is a licence held by a separate legal person, a management that has not moved since 1998, a board of career bankers and auditors with their own reputations at stake, and a regulator that looked at the file in July and signed it.

Every one of those is a habit or a piece of luck. None of them is a rule.
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Biswajit Dutta and Parag Bhatt are still there. Twenty-eight years after a man with no particular pedigree hired them into a room above a garage to sell a thousand dollars to somebody at Tata BP Solar, they sit on the core team of a company that settles trade payments through its own Nostro accounts under a permission the Reserve Bank of India has given to nobody else. Fifty people there have more than twenty years’ service. A hundred and eighty have more than fifteen.

None of them owns a share of it either.

Guruprasad has worked for four sets of owners and chosen none of them. Twice now an ownership he had no hand in picking has arrived at his door carrying a catastrophe, and twice he has kept the counters open while it went overhead.

He did not choose Ebix. He did not choose its lenders, or the default, or the court in Atlanta. He did not choose who bought Ebix out of that court. He did not choose Vikas Garg.

He chose the branches.

That was the only thing he was ever permitted to choose, and he chose it a hundred times. The morning after Garg’s arrest, the shutters went up in all hundred. A father pushed a form across the glass in Coimbatore. A conductor outside Latur held out a handheld and a woman of seventy tapped her card. In Tiruvannamalai a screen refreshed a euro rate nobody looked at twice. None of it made the newspapers. That is what a hundred choices look like. The machine never stopped. Neither did the man who has never owned a share of it.

EbixCash World Money.
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A note on sourcing

The Enforcement Directorate’s case, including the two routing mechanisms, the ₹940.77 crore attachment, the account of Vikas Garg’s own statements and the connection to the Ebix acquisition, is taken from Provisional Attachment Order No. 16/2026 (F. No. ECIR/RPZO/10/2022), read in full. A provisional attachment order is the investigating agency’s case; it awaits confirmation by the Adjudicating Authority. No finding of guilt has been recorded against any person named here, and the matter is live before a PMLA court in Raipur.

The 2008 AD-II classification is documented by CARE Ratings; the June 2006 branch and implant numbers by Business Standard, May 2007; the 2018 transaction by Ebix’s SEC-filed release and Centrum’s sale announcement; the Chapter 11 filing and the August 2024 reorganisation by Ebix’s Form 8-K; the MSRTC contracts by BSE filings and the card rollout by Economic Times CIO; the 21 July 2026 approval by contemporaneous business press.

The first hires and first transaction, the long-service numbers, the operational cost of the Chapter 11 period, the events inside the company on 14 July, Guruprasad’s account of that week, the state of the board and the auditor, the conduct of counterparties afterwards and the volume slowdown and recovery come from EbixCash’s written answers to questions from this publication, and are the company’s account of itself. The market-share rankings, the “first in India” claims and the financial figures are also the company’s.

(Source: BW BusinessWorld, Article by Palak Shah)