The psychology of money in India
With Kunal Shah · Hosted by Raj Shamani
Episode summary
CRED founder Kunal Shah returns to Figuring Out for the show's 200th episode, and the conversation centers on the single thing he says explains almost every consumer behavior in India: the deep, inherited psychology Indians have around money. From why we still negotiate at malls, to why credit is treated as shameful even by people who can comfortably afford it, to why the wealthy in India spend like they're poor and the poor spend like they're wealthy — Kunal unpacks the cultural operating system that founders building for India keep underestimating. He and Raj also get into the trust deficit in Indian B2C, why most loyalty programs fail, and what CRED has learned about the top 1% of Indian consumers that the rest of the market refuses to study.
Key takeaways
- 1.India is a 'low-trust, high-aspiration' market — the gap between what people want to be seen as and what they trust enough to buy is the largest arbitrage in consumer tech.
- 2.Credit is still treated as moral failure in most Indian households, even among the affluent — products that hide credit inside convenience always outperform products that lead with it.
- 3.Status in India is signaled through restraint, not display, once you cross a certain wealth bracket — opposite of the US.
- 4.Loyalty programs fail in India because they reward the median customer. The top 1% drive 40-60% of revenue in every category and they don't care about points — they care about access.
- 5.The biggest unbuilt category in India is products that let the user feel rich without spending — that is the entire premise of CRED.
Full transcript
Transcript edited lightly for readability. Timestamps refer to the YouTube video above.
Kunal, 200th episode. Thank you for doing this one with me. Let's start broad — what do most founders building for India get wrong about Indian consumers?
They assume Indians behave like Americans with less money. They don't. Indians behave like Indians — which is a very specific, very old psychology around money, trust, family, and status. If you don't understand that operating system, your product will get downloaded and never opened.
Give me an example.
Negotiation. An Indian who can afford a five-crore house will still spend forty minutes negotiating five thousand rupees off the broker fee. That's not about the money. That's about not feeling cheated. Western products are built around frictionless conversion. Indian products have to be built around the customer feeling like they won.
Why is credit still such a taboo in India even among the rich?
Because for two generations, debt meant your father failed. That memory is fresh. Even kids who grew up in upper-middle-class households absorbed it. So when you show an Indian consumer a credit product, you're not selling them a tool — you're asking them to take on a moral burden. That's why every successful Indian credit product hides the credit. UPI, EMI on Amazon, BNPL — none of them feel like credit. That's the trick.
What did CRED learn about the top 1% that you wish you'd known on day one?
That they're invisible. They don't post, they don't engage on social media, they don't fill out surveys. Every consumer brand in India is making decisions based on data from the bottom 80% and assuming the top extrapolates. It doesn't. The top 1% have entirely different anxieties — privacy, access, time — and almost no one is building for them.
If you had to bet on one unbuilt category in India for the next decade?
Products that make the user feel wealthy without spending. Status without consumption. That's the entire game now.