Immediately after news broke that Meta has appointed Kunal Shah, co-founder of CRED, as the global head of WhatsApp, pretty sure the next question on everyone’s mind was why? What’s so special about a Mumbai-based fintech founder that probably most people out of India might not have heard about till now.
Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg said about Kunal Shah in his Facebook post, “Kunal built CRED into one of India’s most important technology companies, and he brings the kind of builder mentality and global perspective that will serve him well in running the world’s biggest messaging app.”
Zuckerberg praised Shah’s “builder mentality” and “global perspective” as key traits for what he’s looking for WhatsApp’s next phase of growth, making it more than just a communication app used by over 3 billion people around the world.
“I look forward to working with Kunal to continue to make WhatsApp the best service for billions of people and millions of businesses,” Zuckerberg said in his post, giving us more than a big hint of why Kunal Shah is in the WhatsApp hot seat.
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It’s pretty clear that WhatsApp’s next big growth phase isn’t about communication overload, it revolves around payments and commerce, and Kunal Shah fits in perfectly here as he has spent over a decade building fintech products – first FreeCharge, and now CRED. If WhatsApp has to become a super-app for everything communication, finance, commerce, with AI agents and complex workflows made simple, Kunal Shah is definitely part of the answer of getting there.
Another reason why CRED’s Kunal Shah is the new WhatsApp chief is because he isn’t a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Based in Mumbai, Shah understands Indian consumer behaviour, digital payments and being mobile first better than most. It matters because India isn’t just another geography for Zuckerberg, Meta and WhatsApp – India is WhatsApp’s largest user base.
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Zuckerberg praised Shah’s “builder mentality” and in CRED Shah has built one of India’s most popular apps for credit card users. CRED doesn’t have a lot of users, only 17 million according to Reuters, but it processes over 40% of India’s credit card payments. It definitely has the pulse of high-value fintech customers in India, know how that will no doubt be crucial in unlocking WhatsApp’s appeal and value going forward.
Apart from hiring Kunal Shah away from CRED, Meta is also making a pretty generous $900 million investment in the Indian fintech company. Whether it’s price to peel Shah away from his startup or pouring rocket fuel on CRED’s mission is anyone’s guess, I think it’s a bit of both.
Meta and Zuckerberg aren’t hiring Kunal Shah to simply “run WhatsApp.” It appears to be betting that WhatsApp’s future will involve lots of commerce and payments, backed by AI agents and superintelligence baked in. Where Shah’s job is to imagine and build WhatsApp into a trusted, world-class conversational operating system for chat-based commerce and more.
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