The Green Room | Fintech Journeys in Asia

In this episode, I speak with with Aditi Sholapurkar, Co-Founder of SALT, a savings and investment fintech in India that puts women at the center of its product and strategy.

Aditi grew up in India and began her career in banking and has spent time working at some of the most well known fintechs in India and Singapore, including Paytm and Nium. She came to learn that only 5% of customers of Indian fintechs were women and has been on journey to change that with her latest venture.

Aditi co-founded SALT in 2021, and they are currently raising their seed round. Please reach out if you are interested in getting involved. You can learn more about SALT by visiting salt.one.

In this episode, I speak with The Noe San, Founder and CEO of Modus Operandi, or MO, a digital financial solutions provider in Myanmar, offering services like wallet transfers, bill pay, earned wage access, cash withdrawal, and more.

The Noe grew up in Myanmar and Australia and started her career in law. She moved back to Myanmar in 2020 and got involved in the finance sector through SHWE Bank. She had a front row seat to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and recent military coup on financial services in Myanmar.

With that backdrop, The Noe founded MO in 2020 and launched the first MVP in 2021. She bootstrapped MO for the first two years and then fundraised for the first time from a local bank in September of 2022. You can learn more about Modus Operandi, or MO, by visiting mo.com.mm.

In this episode, I speak with Vikram Kotibhaskar, co-founder and CEO of Credlinq.AI, which provides embedded finance products to digital e-commerce players using alternative data. Vikram was born and raised in India, completed his Master’s in the US, and then spent many years working across diverse banking roles in Asia. Vikram made the jump to fintech founder with Credilinq.AI in January 2021.

Credilinq.AI is focusing their B2B credit services across Southeast Asia and Australia and already has quite a bit of traction in Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. They raised a 1M USD angel round in Feb of 2021, a 2.6M USD seed round in April of 2022, and just closed an extension of that seed round earlier this year in February. You can learn more about them by visting credilinq.ai.

In this episode, I speak with Maha Shahzad, Founder and CEO of BusCaro, a mobility startup in Pakistan that is changing the way that commuters travel.

Maha grew up between the US and Pakistan and has worked at many well-known startups in Pakistan inluding FoodPanda, Careem, and Swvl. Maha has seen first-hand the financial, accessibility, and security challenges faced by commuters, particularly women, and started BusCaro to solve them. Maha started BusCaro in August of 2022 and is already active in 3 cities across Pakistan. You can learn more about them by visiting buscaro.com.

This is not our typical Green Room episode focused on a fintech startup, but given my own background in mobility and Maha’s inspiring story, I wanted to share the good work that she is doing, especially as we celebrate International Women’s Day 2023. We added a few minutes at the end of the podcast to share about Maha’s experience working and fundraising as a woman, and I am happy to support her as part of Findicate, a women-focused angel investing syndicate I recently founded - DM me or shoot me an email to [email protected] if you want to learn more.

In this episode, I speak with fintech pioneer, Diego Rojas. He has been at the cutting edge of fintech across the globe. 

Diego is from Argentina and started coding when he was 8 years old. He joined LendingClub in its very early days in 2011 and then moved to DianRong, another pioneer in fintech in China. He founded a fintech consulting firm called LEAP FINTECH based in Singapore in 2017 before founding open finance company, Finantier, in 2020. This episode was recorded toward the end of 2022 when Diego was CEO of Finantier, so we spend some time talking about Finantier’s business.

Today, however, Diego is working on some exciting new fintech projects, which we’ll hopefully hear about in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this episode of the Green Room.

In this episode, I speak with Rebecca Kersch, Founder and CEO of TANGapp, a remittance and payments company that helps overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in the US send money to the Philippines.

Rebecca grew up in the US and the Netherlands, spent many summers visiting her family in the Philippines, and has studied and lived all over the world. Rebecca started her career in management consulting - the same one as me actually, and we crossed paths again when we were both doing our Masters at Harvard.

Rebecca started TANGapp in 2020 to help OFWs send money back to their loved ones in the Philippines and has grown into the payments space since. TANGapp is currently raising a seed round, and I’m happy to share that my women-focused angel investing syndicate, Findicate, is one of the participants. You can learn more about TANGapp by visting tangapp.org, and you can learn more about Findicate by shooting an email to [email protected].

Welcome back to season 4 to the Green Room, a podcast where we go behind the scenes with fintech entrepreneurs and thought leaders in Asia about their careers, impact, and industry insights. I'm your host, Amrita Vir.

I’m excited to be back sharing my fintech conversations with you. This season, we’ll go back to some fintech basics like payments, lending, and insurance. In the current macro environment, I want to check in to see how these verticals are doing. Don’t worry, we’ll still talk about some alternative fintech models. I also have a couple bonus episodes lined up with some badass leaders that have unique perspectives - I thought you might like to hear their stories too.

Thanks for listening the Green Room Podcast. We’re sponsored by the ASEAN Financial Innovation Network (or AFIN), Oxygen by APIX, and open banking fintech Brankas. If you know anyone who would be a great guest or have any feedback, reach out to us at [email protected]. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy season 4. Happy listening!

In the last episode of Sesason 3 of The Green Room, I speak with Sherry Jiang, Co-founder and CEO of Bluejay, a web3 startup that uses a decentralized stablecoin protocol to issue stablecoins pegged to non-US currencies.

Sherry is from California, spent her early career in big tech and social impact, and moved to Singapore in 2018 with Google. She spent time working on Google Pay in India and had a first row seat to the challenges to financial inclusion with web2 payments. Seeing the infrastructure possilbities with web3, Sherry founded Bluejay a little over a year ago in Q3 of 2021.

Bluejay mints emerging market stablecoins and manages a pool of capital to maintain a peg that reflects the real-world value of currency, which has become especially useful for cases like cross-border business payments and payroll. Bluejay’s first market is Singapore, and they are looking to expand across Asia. They closed a $2.9 million seed round in July. You can learn more about them by visiting bluejay.finance.

In this episode, I speak with Ankur Joshi, founder and CEO of Nuclei, a B2B SaaS fintech that helps banks deliver consumer-centric experiences to their customers.

Ankur grew up in India, is an IIT grad, and has been a serial entrepreneur for more than 10 years. He’s worked in startups covering everything from e-commerce to quick serve restaurants to app aggregation - and he has used his lessons across industries and startups as he builds Nuclei.

Nuclei was founded in 2018 in India but aims to serve a global market. Nuclei has several modular products targeting different banking verticals that enable banks to operate like a fintech resulting in a seamless consumer experience. To date, Nuclei has been a bootstrapped business and currently serve more than 18 banks across the globe. You can learn more about them by visting gonuclei.com.

In this episode, I speak with Ananya Sinha, the founder of Brown Baddies, an NFT project focused on elevating South Asian women.

Ananya was born in New Zealand, grew up in Australia, and is now telling the stories of South Asian women all over the world via NFTs. Ananya is relatively new to web3, but has been an entrepreneur since her uni days at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Ananya spent her pandemic years working as a consultant at Publicis Sapient, and in March, she turned investor with Artesian.

Brown Baddies has been Ananya’s side hustle NFT project since the beginning of 2022. I actually found out about them through an Instagram post, and as a South Asian woman, I was thrilled to finally see an NFT project that I could relate to. I couldn’t help but reach out to Ananya to have her on the the Green Room podcast. Brown Baddies isn’t just minting NFTs - proceeds are going to important iniatives like supporing NGOs working to combat gender-based violence in South Asia and creating a global directory of South Asian women-owned businesses. You can learn more about them by visting brownbaddies.xyz and following @BrownBaddiesNFT on Twitter.