Kunal Shah: Scoring on trust

It’s teatime when we walk into the Cred office in Bengaluru’s Indiranagar on a Friday evening. Like I remember telling Vijay once, ‘Vijay, if you run a PR company, it will be a $10 billion company,’” says Shah, 40, laughing, as we settle down in a small meeting room. Shah started working at 16 at a data-entry job while running “side-businesses” like selling CDs and mehndi cones, teaching computer science to neighbourhood children, and running a cyber café from his home in Mumbai. But it’s simple: Would an Indian, unused to doing online transactions, first buy a shirt online or recharge his mobile online?” Today, he says he is focusing on the niche and untapped segment because “it’s impossible to make money from the masses when their per capita income is not going to allow to pay for convenience”. But what if both parties were trusted players?” Essentially, Cred is building a community of people with high “trust scores” and is creating other services around this, like helping banks lend on the platform, helping users invest in real estate in a fractional manner or in foreign companies—or even acting as a niche classifieds service.