Meet the man behind InCred's success

InCred is one of the fastest growing Financial Services groups in India. The group was founded by 46-year-old Bhupinder Singh whose journey from small town Bhopal to IIM Ahmedabad, to leading successful multi-billion-dollar global businesses for Deutsche Bank and then establishing InCred has been nothing short of a dream run.

The recent backing for InCred Finance from a global heavyweight like KKR has once again catapulted the down-to-earth Bhupi into the limelight. Behind the scenes there is the story of an individual, who recognises that entrepreneurship is a 24/7 lifestyle choice and whose personal values are reflected in the way he runs the business.

Prior to launching InCred, Bhupi was the co-head of Banking and Markets for Asia Pacific at Deutsche Bank and was part of the core team that ran the global Banking and Markets businesses. While he was still at Deutsche, Bhupi saw the immense and unique opportunity that the Indian financial services market presented. Even through the competitive landscape appeared crowded from the outside with Public and Pvt Sector Banks, NBFCs and Fintechs all jostling for space, Bhupi strongly believed that there was a big gap that could be addressed by a financial institution acting as a bridge as a bridge between traditional banking and new-age tech led practises. In 2016, he felt the timing was right for him to kick start his entrepreneurial journey, just as the buzz around global banks was starting to peter out.

Bhupinder spent the first 12-15 months of the InCred journey researching the market, hiring the right talent and raising equity funding. Besides putting everything he owned into the business, he also received the support of marquee global & domestic investors who had conviction in his business vision.

In 2017, Bhupi set up InCred as an NBFC with cutting edge technology and best-in-class risk management at the core of its business. InCred’s focus is to make lending quick and hassle-free for the many under-served consumers and small businesses in India. There are over 100 million prospective customers, many without any previous credit history, who are currently below the target segment for commercial banks and above that for MFIs. InCred has been able to cater to over 6 lac consumers already through its innovative offerings in the Personal Loans, Education Loans and SME Loans segments. InCred aims to instil a sense of confidence in all its prospective borrowers through its interactions with them, removing any apprehensions that may be associated with the concept of borrowing.

When faced with challenges in the course of this journey, Bhupi has taken them in his stride, saying that, “Constant innovation and improvement is core to everything we do at InCred. A fast-changing market like India will always throw up new challenges. A winning attitude and an ability to ignore the pessimists go a long way in facing up to them. Having the ability to take nimble and tough decisions is imperative in building the foundation for sustainable success.”

In a short span of five years, apart from the NBFC business, Bhupi also launched InCred Capital which is an integrated institutional, wealth and asset management platform. InCred’s businesses now range from retail and small business lending to wealth management, asset management, investment banking and capital markets, institutional equities research & broking and interests in FinTech start-ups in lending, analytics and wealth. InCred has offices across 24 cities in India, as well as in Singapore and the Middle-East.

As a leader, Bhupi believes in inculcating a meritocratic culture where people trust that rewards and recognition follow automatically because of high performance and hard work. He has an open-door policy and is accessible to everyone in the team no matter how junior. The passion he feels for the InCred story seems to rub off on everyone who works there.

When quizzed about his vision for InCred, Bhupi says, “In the short term, we are very excited about each of the different business units we have created within InCred, we now need to suitably scale-up in each one of these, continue to attract and retain the best of talent, further enhance our class-leading technology and risk framework, and eventually list in public markets to create significant value for the shareholders and employees that have backed our vision.”

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