Giving Due Credit

Six years after exiting his ride-hailing service venture TaxiForSure, Raghunandan G starts neobank Zolve—a branchless, digital banking services provider that offers access to local credit and insurance at affordable rates to those who traverse the globe

- HARICHANDAN ARAKALI

Six years ago, co-founders Raghunandan G and Aprameya Radhakrishna were building TaxiForSure, a cab-hailing services provider, when rival Ola swooped in and bought out their Bengaluru startup. The stock-and-cash deal announced in March 2015 was reported to be worth $200 million; the founders have never publicly revealed what their take was.

Raghunandan, 39, used the early exit to turn investor, backing several startups over the last few years. He also travelled to startup hubs in China, Israel and the US. On one of those trips to New York, he saw some friends pay a dinner bill at a restaurant with their debit card rather than a credit card, something that is extremely common in the US. It triggered a thought process that would lead him back to entrepreneurship.

“These were people I had studied with, worked with, and they had done well in life… but they didn’t have a credit card,” says Raghunandan. The reason: When people travel to the US, banks there have no way of assessing their creditworthiness and often categorise them in the higher credit risk bracket, making it absurdly difficult to get a basic credit card, he explains. “You have to give $1,000 as deposit to get a card with a limit of $250.”

“I was a bit shocked,” he recalls. “Because if you looked at the colleges they had attended, the kind of companies they had worked with… these people would be among the lowest credit risk customers.” Then he started asking questions to his friends and discovered that this wasn’t just the case with people moving from India to the US, Europe or Australia. It was a problem faced even by those relocating from one advanced economy to another “because the financial systems of different countries don’t speak to each other”.