I had to borrow a lot of money from my peers to be able to pay my rent. Which, as you can imagine, was not a very pleasant experience. Because you have to ask, 'can you lend me a little bit of money here, a little bit of money there' and have to remember who you borrow money from.

And I was dreaming of having an application that could solve these kinds of issues for me. And back then Tinder was already popular among kids, if it can say so. But there was no Tinder-like application to just match with people for the sake of borrowing money from them. I ended up building it myself after not finding it available.

It's been four years since I started building Lendwill, and it is extremely difficult to build a good peer-to-peer lending platform that would allow individuals to borrow money from each other. So I can understand why there had not been any product that I wanted back in the day because it's really hard!

So we did this that at the beginning, the very first experiments, the very first beta test, is if you want to borrow from Credilikeme, you need to post on your wall and have 10 friends vouch for you.

And then, like that, we came up with this term of crowdsourcing your credit score.

Definitely, that was non-scalable.

It was challenging, operational wise, but we learned a lot of the willingness, we learned a lot about the willingness of people to prove they're credit worthy when there isn't enough information. And we learn that if we create this circle of trust with our user base, they would be willing to share stuff with us.

So we had to tweak it and move it to image-based selection. And one thing led to the other and ConfirmU evolved from something which is good for the English language but is not scalable for 207 dialects in India, to an actual gamification, which would be much more engaging for people at the bottom of the pyramid. So what better way, you know, of engaging people in that kind of a segment. And our initial pilot was with Experian the nd Grameen Foundation in India, which is really exciting, because in my vision, Grameen Foundation is financial inclusion.

Now, as you said, ConfirmU started out as prop tech before expanding into financial services. What does the product look like today?

What we take pride in is the fact that we collateralize and localise the game to any market that we go to - credit at the end of the day is a matter of cultures, and we need to embed that within our game. So we will do a pilot and we will build a bespoke model for those lenders based on, you know, our understanding from the lender of the practicalities and the characteristics of that audience. And then we would send the link.