Kaleidofin: Can a disruptive fin-tech company create a mass-market for savings and investment in India?

This article was first published on the Impact Money Blog. The Impact Money Blog sat down with Puneet Gupta to find out why he left Dvara Trust (formerly known as IFMR Trust), a group he co-founded in 2007, to start Kaleidofin, an ambitious fintech company that wants to make savings and investment convenient for millions of customers at the base of the economic pyramid. Puneet Gupta, a veteran social entrepreneur in the field of microfinance, knows the poor would be better off saving rather than borrowing to achieve their financial goals. Although microfinance has been credited with improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the developing world, the industry has grappled with the ethics of indebting the most economically vulnerable. This is particularly true in India, which experienced a regulatory backlash over this issue in 2010 that threw the industry into turmoil.