Fintech firm CheQ aims to check boxes for every credit need

Founder Aditya Soni is very clear that he is not interested in selling financial products; instead, he is laser-focused on keeping customers' credit healthy

A quick scroll through CheQ co-founder Aditya Soni’s LinkedIn profile reveals a history of product success spanning nearly two decades, packed with metrics that founders envy and product managers use as a blueprint. 

 

Soni, the founder and CEO of credit management platform CheQ, spent nearly eight years each at industry giants like Flipkart and Citibank, shaping their payments and cards business. After last serving as the business head of payments and the fintech group at Flipkart, he quit in 2022 after he had an epiphany about personalised fintech products.  

 

This was the time when credit in India was picking up pace in the country, with fintech platforms seeking growth by cross-selling every financial service one could think of: credit cards, loans, insurance, even wealth management.  

 

“The idea of CheQ to me came from my own personal experiences in terms of how credit penetration was increasing very fast in India. But nobody was focusing on helping consumers manage their credit which stays true even today. Credit management continues to be a massively divergent space,” he says.  

 

Soni is quick to pull out a spreadsheet of numbers to explain the problem. He points out that over 515 million users have a credit profile but only about 200 million have active credit.  

 

“350 million consumers have fallen out of all the credit after coming into it because they couldn't manage their credit lifestyle for whatever reasons. We thought about how we can create a proposition for the rest of the 200 million users to help them remain comfortably in the world of credit,” he said.  

 

At present, the company claims to have a registered user base of around 2.3 million customers of which its monthly active users (MAUs), the holy grail of metrics for companies, is pegged at over a million. He added that an average user visits the application about seven times a month with the average credit card bill paid at Rs 75,000.  

 

Last year, the Bengaluru-based firm processed around $4 billion in credit card bill payments, he claims.  

 

At a time when fintechs in the country are trying to extract maximum value from every dollar spent on customer acquisition costs (CAC) by cross-selling a multitude of financial services to bump up toplines, Soni steers clear from becoming a fintech super-app; he wants CheQ to only be a ‘hard-core credit app’.  

 

“I don't want to ever be selling home or car insurance. There is no merit in what CheQs stands for and what car insurance is for. We don't want to be selling e-commerce or holidays, we don’t have a TPAP (third-party application provider) or a scan-and-pay solution,” he said.  

 

The company has raised $17.8 million to date, according to data from market intelligence platform Tracxn.  

 

Soni added that the company is in talks with two to three banking partners to issue a co-branded credit card this year. The company has partnered with three lending partners including Fibe, Bajaj Finserv and AFPL.