Akshay Garg took the long way to a two-click loan

Before Akshay Garg helped people spread the cost of purchases, he tried selling kebabs in China. The ambition was a restaurant franchise. The result was more modest. His own account of the venture contained an admirably economical review: “Didn’t work out. And then Komli happened.”

There are polished ways to tell a founder’s story. Garg’s early career makes polishing rather difficult. A lifestyle magazine in Yunnan, a restaurant, advertising technology, consumer lending: the sequence looks less like a plan than a succession of experiments with increasingly demanding customers. A diner can send back dinner. A borrower and a bank require a rather more elaborate arrangement.

Today, Garg is co-founder and Group CEO of Kredivo Group. His work sits at the meeting point of an ordinary desire and an institutional hesitation: someone wants to make a purchase, and a lender wants to know whether the money will come back. Much of his career has become an effort to shorten the distance between those two positions without pretending the distance is imaginary.

A résumé with a restaurant in the middle

Garg grew up in India, studied at Whitman College in the United States, worked at Deloitte in Seattle and then at the International Labour Organization in Geneva. By 2005, he was trying entrepreneurial projects in China. The geographical range is considerable; the change in occupation is even better. International institutions and kebab restaurants have rather different approaches to lunch.

His education also contains a departure. At Geneva’s Graduate Institute, where he studied between 2002 and 2004 on a Swiss government scholarship, he says he completed the coursework in a year and a half and left to pursue business adventures in India and China. It is an unusually specific distinction to preserve on a public résumé: the coursework finished, the next adventure calling.

Komli Media, which he co-founded in 2006, gave those experiments a more durable business setting. Advertising technology supplied a new set of problems: finding audiences, matching them with advertisers and making decisions with data. The work put him inside the machinery of internet commerce before he began lending to its customers.

At Komli, Garg held roles in international business development and corporate strategy. He worked on acquisitions spanning Australia, Britain and Southeast Asia, and on partnerships with companies including Google, Facebook and Twitter. The experience involved the unglamorous connective tissue of expansion: transactions, relationships and the work required to make separate businesses operate together.

He became a Kauffman Fellow, Class 18. His professional life had acquired a network as well as a map. By the time he moved toward financial technology, he had already worked across markets and helped a technology company grow through acquisition. Regional expansion would be familiar territory, even when the product changed.

Five months before the first few clicks

In late 2015, Garg was discussing a new venture at the intersection of finance and e-commerce. He was guarded about the product, but quite open about the preparation. He had spent more than five months studying financial rules, revisiting questions and meeting experts and lawyers.

It is a useful scene to place beside the eventual promise of fast credit. The customer would see a short application and a quick decision. The founder had been spending months working through the conditions that could make such a decision legitimate. Speed at the front of a product can require an extraordinary amount of waiting behind it.

His concerns extended to security and reliability. Money imposed obligations that could not be waved away with a cheerful apology after a breach. Even before the product was public, he described financial technology as work requiring care about the rules and the trust attached to people’s information.

He co-founded FinAccel with Umang Rustagi and Alie Tan. Kredivo began operating in April 2016, when its first loan was disbursed. The initial proposition was simple enough to explain at a checkout: customers could obtain credit digitally and repay purchases later, including through instalments. Delivering it required decisions about people who might have little conventional credit history.

In a 2020 conversation, Garg described the early decision to build Kredivo’s own technology, including credit scoring, as particularly valuable. That choice gave the business control over a function at the centre of lending. An attractive payment button has limited use if the decision behind it cannot be made reliably.

The colleagues behind the checkout

The public version of Garg can sound less interested in the solitary founder than the people around him. In 2015, discussing Komli, he stressed complementary skills, trust and the need to work together for five or ten years. Disagreement belonged in that picture. So did respecting a colleague’s judgment when another person understood something better.

By 2019, he was making a similar argument at Kredivo. Caring for employees, in his description, involved listening to their ambitions and understanding what they wanted from their work. Office comforts and perks were an incomplete answer. A nice room is pleasant; it cannot do the listening.

“Build an amazing team and take really good care of them.”

Akshay Garg, 2019

He reported annual employee attrition of about 1.5% to 2% at the time. That is a historical claim from the founder, rather than a promise about the company today. Its presence in his account is revealing: when asked about a growing lending business, he chose to discuss how many colleagues stayed.

The same instinct appeared when he received Singapore’s EY Entrepreneur Of The Year award in the Financial Technology category in 2022. He described the recognition as belonging to his team. Awards tend to put one name on the invitation. Garg’s public response widened the guest list.

Rustagi and Tan are part of that longer continuity. They were named alongside Garg when he explained the company’s founding in 2021. The work has always required more than a persuasive account of an underserved market: operating discipline and technology have had to accompany the ambition.

The listing that stayed on paper

In August 2021, FinAccel announced a plan to go public through a merger with VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings II. The proposed transaction carried an expected value of about $2.5 billion. Garg appeared on television to discuss the plan. For a company built around getting purchases over the line, its own proposed market debut became a transaction that did not close.

The parties agreed to terminate the business combination in March 2022. That event belongs in the story alongside the funding announcements and product launches. It separates a proposed valuation and route to market from an accomplished listing, a distinction easily lost when a company’s history is reduced to its largest headline number.

Private capital continued to matter. In March 2023, Mizuho Bank announced a $125 million investment in Kredivo Holdings. Its explanation focused on consumers underserved by existing banks, the expansion of payment options into physical shops and the development of digital banking through Krom.

The institutional company was becoming more visible. Alongside the customer application stood bank relationships, funding arrangements and a widening set of regulated businesses. A consumer might encounter the group for a single purchase. Garg was now overseeing an organisation with reasons to remain part of that customer’s financial life beyond the checkout.

A familiar acquisition problem, with money attached

Krom’s digital banking launch in February 2024 gave that wider ambition a concrete form in Indonesia. The group acquired earned wage access platform GajiGesa in February 2025. Each addition increased the range of financial needs the organisation could address, while making the chief executive’s job less like running a single credit application.

Then came Timo. On May 6, 2026, Kredivo Group announced its acquisition of approximately 100% of the Vietnamese digital banking platform, which was developed in cooperation with BVBank. Timo would retain its own brand, and the existing Kredivo Vietnam operation would become Timo Credit.

For Garg, this was another encounter with the acquisition question he had worked on at Komli: what should an expanding company buy, and what should it preserve? His explanation emphasised Timo’s existing relationship with Vietnamese consumers. Local trust was part of the asset. The transaction bought more than a collection of software.

The arrangement also retained local connections. Phoenix Holdings and VinaCapital would hold a significant minority stake in the enlarged Vietnam business. Henry Nguyen, Don Lam and Brook Taylor would join its board. The company described a combination of lending capabilities and banking services, with the existing Vietnam management team running the joint business.

That makes the regional ambition more specific than a list of countries on a presentation. The challenge is to combine operations, people and customer relationships while preserving the reasons customers chose them. Acquisition provides a starting position. The daily work comes afterwards.

The village gets a mention

At Kredivo’s tenth-anniversary celebrations in 2026, Garg thanked colleagues’ families. He pointed to extended working days and missed weekends, acknowledging the patience required from people outside the company. The celebration included a Family Fun Day. A corporate anniversary had become an occasion to name some of the work that never appears on an organisation chart.

It is a fitting place to leave him: a founder whose experiments have travelled from restaurant tables to banking apps, talking about the people who make the enterprise possible. His stated ambition is to serve tens of millions of Southeast Asian consumers. The scale is large. The concerns he returns to are recognisable: choosing colleagues, earning trust, understanding a market and staying useful long enough to build something that lasts.