* Meta appoints Kunal Shah to lead WhatsApp business

* Meta invests $900 million in Shah's fintech venture CRED

* Shah will step back from executive role at CRED but keep

his 20% stake in the firm

By Ashwin Manikandan, Jaspreet Kalra and Haripriya Suresh

MUMBAI, June 25 (Reuters) - Kunal Shah, an Indian fintech

founder with no engineering degree or Silicon Valley pedigree,

has spent two decades building businesses around digital

payments and consumer behaviour in India.

He now takes charge of Meta's WhatsApp as the

company looks to leverage the reach of the world's largest

messaging platform and build a "superapp" to capture a bigger

share of surging online payments, industry players say.

Meta was looking for a leader with "an intuitive grasp of the

immense, global product potential for WhatsApp", Chief Product

Officer Chris Cox wrote in an internal memo announcing

47-year-old Shah's appointment on Monday.

"Over the course of the (now many) conversations I've had

with Kunal through this courting process, he has shown an

immense entrepreneurial energy combined with a natural

humanism," Cox said in the note reviewed by Reuters.

Shah's appointment comes alongside Meta's $900 million

investment in his fintech venture CRED, a Bengaluru-based credit

card management company backed by Peak XV and Tiger Global. Shah

will keep his CRED stake of about 20% but step back from an

executive role in the firm.

"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," Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's founder,

chair and CEO, said in a statement.

Shah declined to comment.

Industry executives say the move reflects Meta's ambitions

to deepen commerce and financial services offerings across

emerging markets such as India, Brazil and Indonesia. India is

WhatsApp's largest market, with more than 500 million users.

"If you look at where WhatsApp is right now, they are in a

league of their own as far as messaging is concerned, and it

remains an excellent tool for small businesses to discover

commerce, but the leg which is broken is payments," said

Siddarth Pai, founding partner at venture capital firm 3one4

Capital.

Shah's experience developing consumer-facing payments

products from scratch in India makes him a logical choice, Pai

added.

PHILOSOPHY STUDENT TO ENTREPRENEUR

Born in the western city of Ahmedabad and raised in Mumbai,

Shah began working as a teenager after his family ran into

financial difficulties, he has said.

Unlike the Indian tech executives who are engineering

graduates, Shah studied philosophy at Mumbai's Wilson College

and later dropped out of a management course at Narsee Monjee

Institute of Management Studies.

In 2010, he founded Freecharge, a mobile recharge platform that

was sold to Snapdeal, an Indian e-commerce company, in 2015 for

about $400 million, one of India's largest startup exits at the

time.

Three years later, Shah launched CRED with his own capital,

targeting affluent Indian consumers with high credit scores and

rewarding them for paying credit card bills on time.

CRED later expanded into payments, lending, insurance and wealth

products, reporting revenue in 2024 to 2025 of 27 billion rupees

($313 million) and a loss of 2.9 billion rupees.

The company says it has 17 million users and processes more

than 40% of India's credit card bill payments.

"Kunal has a very rare trait: incredible non-obvious

insights into consumer psychology," which might stem from his

background in philosophy, said Gokul Rajaram, an early investor

in both Freecharge and CRED.

INDIAN, GLOBAL CHALLENGES

At WhatsApp, Shah inherits a platform searching for growth.

In 2018, two years before WhatsApp Pay's India launch, Shah

wrote in a social media post that WhatsApp may be "the last to

launch payments ... but the beauty of products with large

distribution and network effects is that you can turn any

product into your feature at will and win."

Turning that vision into reality may prove tough in India,

where WhatsApp remains a marginal payments player despite the

size of its subscriber base, trailing leaders PhonePe and Google

Pay.

WhatsApp has also faced regulatory challenges in India and

globally, including scrutiny over privacy and data-sharing,

government access to encrypted communications, and competition

concerns.

Shah's experience navigating payments, product development and

regulation could prove helpful, industry players said.

"What sets Kunal apart is a rare ability to bring a product

lens to regulatory complexity, and a regulatory lens to product

design," said Shweta Rajpal Kohli, chief executive of India's

Startup Policy Forum and former head of policy at Peak XV, one

of CRED's earliest investors.