What led Raghunandan G to transition from the mobility space to fintech, and what experiences did he bring with him to the fintech space?

I'm an engineer who worked for a couple of years before doing my MBA. After that I worked as a consultant for a few years, then started a venture called TaxiForSure. 

As a consultant, I traveled a lot. And wherever we used to travel, finding a cab was always a challenge. Usually, our company would have a partnership with some taxi vendor, and we'd get taxis from there. But whenever we were in cities where we didn't have this kind of partnership, we would call up radio cabs such as Meru, Easy Cabs, Mega Cabs. Often the call center would be busy and you would get the recorded message that “Your call is important to us. Please wait for twenty minutes.” But what would happen is you would see a lot of empty cars on the road waiting for customers, and you would have customers waiting for taxis. Because the call center was the bottleneck, we were not able to get in touch with each other. 

I think during that time is probably when the geolocation sensor was added to smartphones. As a consultant, I used to get the latest phones from the office. So that's when I thought, “Okay, what are the call center people actually doing? They search for any cabs in the immediate vicinity of where the customers are and they will just locate them -- which the customers themselves can do if you provide a platform for customers to see where the cabs are and a service for them to communicate with the drivers directly. This is not rocket science. We can possibly start building it.” So that's how we got in the taxi space, and then the journey happened. I exited TaxiForSure. 

Post TaxiForSure, I've been an active angel investor in the startup ecosystem in India. I have a personal portfolio of around seventy companies now, including a few unicorns and a few $100 million plus companies. I sit on the boards of some of these companies as well. I’m an LP also in some funds -- Accel Partners, Blume Ventures and a few others. As part of my angel investments, I used to travel a lot. I traveled to China and the US to understand what was really happening, primarily because I think India is a few years behind the Chinese and the US markets, and if I’m able to see what’s working well in those countries I can choose the kinds of companies that I hopefully want to invest in. 

During one such trip, I was meeting some friends who had moved to the US recently. We had dinner in New York, and when the check came, they offered to pay because they were the host, and they used cash to pay. I was like, “Why are you using cash?” In India, we never use cash. People like us always use a credit card to pay. So they explained, “No, we don't have a credit card, so we're using cash to pay.” I asked them, “Aren't you upset?” They had very good profiles, and how could they not get a credit card? They said, “Because we don't have a local credit history here, we are high credit risk individuals. That's how the banks see us. We need to slowly build everything.” I said, “But you guys have an amazing credit history in India.” They told me that the Indian credit history didn’t work in the US. I was shocked. Your education qualification in India works in the US. Your work experience in India is counted. Why shouldn't your credit history be counted?

Then I met some guy from Lisbon and, a couple of days later, a guy from Canada. I spoke to them, and they also said the same thing. They also found it challenging. I thought maybe this was pertinent just to the US, but then I spoke to some people in China, the UK and Germany, and they were facing the same problem everywhere. In India, too, it's the same case. It’s so unfair. Credit history is a reflection of one's behavior, and that doesn't change based on the location. Why this happens is because the financial institutions in one country don't talk to the financial institutions in other countries. That's where there's an arbitrage, where a low-risk individual in one country is treated as a high-risk individual in another country. So let's see if there's a way for us to solve it. That's how Zolve started. 

The more I started dabbling in this, the more I realized it was a universal problem. Every year, twenty million migrants travel across the world to different countries, and there is a lot of cross-border activity. They have their families back here, their investments back here, they earn money there, and then they send money back here. This happens in all countries. So I thought that cross-border is an extremely large market -- much larger than probably the domestic market -- and I realized that nobody else was looking at it. Usually, everybody is looking at the domestic markets only. Cross-border has been driven by some of the larger banks, which haven't done much innovation over the last twenty to thirty years. We thought that this was something that we needed to address. It was a great starting point for us. In terms of the market also, what we realized was that these days, wars are not fought with guns and tanks. They’re fought on trade sanctions. When you cut trade to a country, the country comes to a standstill. So by far, this is the largest market that anybody can look at. 

Cross-border is not just remittances. Travelers who come to India also have issues buying tickets. They have to book flight tickets; they need to buy insurance. Also, using an Indian credit card or a forex card in the US -- they all have their issues. The entire experience is broken. And not just that. Currently, we are a US company with an Indian subsidiary. If we move money from the US to India for three or four days, no one knows where the money has gone. And the exchange rate is at the time of the money hitting the bank at the destination, not when it was initiated. I don't know how people have been living with this for twenty years. 

This market is very ripe for disruption. And this is what got me excited. I didn’t want to wait for somebody else to come and start this, where I could potentially pay a lot as an investor. I thought it made sense for me to go ahead and do this. This is trying to build something for the global markets based in India. I’ve built a consumer brand in India and have been part of many others, so building another consumer brand in India might not necessarily be something that would push me. But building something global out of India is way out of my comfort zone, and that’s something that I wanted to do. And the whole objective is to provide to every individual and every entity an opportunity to participate in the global markets. That’s the reason that pushed me.