ZeroPay began as a credit card for India's Gen Z. It became a credit research platform. This page is the record of that change, kept in full, because the first idea is part of how we arrived at the second.
Zero Card · Aurora finish
Two finishes, designed in full. The product was complete on paper and on screen. It was never issued.
India has roughly 380 million people in Gen Z. Almost all carry a smartphone and grew up paying with UPI, yet very few can hold a credit card. The reason is a closed loop: you need a credit history to get a card, and a card to build a credit history. Traditional underwriting rests on a CIBIL score this generation has never had the means to create.
Zero Card was built to break that loop. We replaced the CIBIL gate with income based approval, set limits from ₹10,000 to ₹2,00,000 against bank statements rather than a score, and made onboarding fully paperless. The card lived inside UPI, supported QR and tap to pay, and carried no annual fee and no hidden charges. Around it sat credit score tracking, spending analytics and two to three percent cashback at the places this cohort already spends, from food delivery and online retail to entertainment and travel. Distribution was co-branded with digital-first banks and NBFCs on a revenue and risk sharing model.
Issuing credit in India is a regulated activity. To hold the licence the product required, an NBFC must show net owned funds in the region of two million dollars, and its directors must clear the Reserve Bank's fit and proper standards, including a minimum age.
We were eighteen at the time, and the regulatory minimum age for directors was twenty-two. We could design the card, model the risk and line up the partners, but we could not hold the licence that sat underneath all of it. Rather than try to work around that, we wound the card down and closed it on 23 December 2024, then looked again at where we could actually build.
When we stepped back, one gap was obvious. The tools for equity research are everywhere, polished and abundant. The tools for credit research are not. An analyst looking at spreads, yields and refinancing risk still works through scattered terminals and spreadsheets. There was no simple, well built place to do the work.
That gap sits in front of a very large market. So ZeroPay became a credit research platform. It tracks high yield spreads, yields and the rating curve, maps issuer capital structures and maturity walls to flag refinancing risk, and measures how credit moves against equity volatility, commodities and rates. It runs on live data from the Federal Reserve.