Iman Jamall is the cofounder and head of design at CreditBook, a Karachi company that began in June 2020 as a free digital ledger for small shopkeepers and has since added lending. She is not the engineer or the financier of the founding team. She is the person who went into the shops, watched how credit was recorded, and turned what she saw into a product.
That makes her an unusual figure in Pakistani fintech, where the founders who get profiled are mostly bankers and software engineers. Jamall came to the problem as a service designer, a profession built around observing how people behave rather than how a bank assumes they do. Her research in late 2019 is the root of the company.
By December 2021 CreditBook had attracted an $11 million pre Series A round led by Tiger Global and Firstminute Capital. This profile follows the part of the story that belongs to Jamall: the ledger, the people who used it, and the way the product has changed around her.
A bank project and a shop floor
Jamall did not set out to build a fintech. In late 2019 she was a service designer on a project for one of Pakistan's largest banks, and the job sent her into corner shops and market stalls to survey retailers and unbanked traders. What she found, according to a December 2021 account in We Talk Startups, was that almost every shop ran on informal credit, the practice known as udhaar, and that the record of it lived in a paper khata.
“We started the research and began experimentation in late 2019.”
The khata is the shopkeeper's account book. Each customer who buys on credit has a page, and the shop owner is both lender and bookkeeper, chasing payments in person and relying on memory when a page runs out. TechCrunch reported that the problems she identified were cash flow, the role of credit and its social relationships, and a heavy reliance on paper. For a bank researcher the finding was that the unbanked economy is not unbanked at all. It runs on lending, only without records that a lender can use.
From a shelved startup to CreditBook
Jamall met Hasib Malik, later her husband, while studying at Esade, the business and law school in Barcelona. We Talk Startups reported that the two first worked together on a startup for mass transit in Karachi, and dropped it after failing to land a workable partnership with a transport company. When her bank research turned up the ledger problem, she brought Malik in to work on cash flow and cash conversion.
The third cofounder was Hisham Adamjee, who, by the same account, had around 15 years of experience in the sector and proposed a model that had already worked for startups in India and Indonesia. After trial and error, the version that worked best was a basic digital ledger with automated repayment alerts. CreditBook launched in June 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and the founders paid for the first version themselves.
Designing for a shopkeeper with no accounting training
Jamall's brief to herself was to make something a shopkeeper with no accounting training would use every day. The app logged what customers owed, kept a transaction history, worked in six local languages and sent free SMS and WhatsApp reminders. Her partner Malik told We Talk Startups that digitising the sector meant taking traders through an education process, which is a design problem as much as a sales one.
Forbes, which named Jamall and Malik to its 30 Under 30 Asia list for social impact in April 2021, recorded that the app had passed 250,000 registered users and had raised $175,000 in pre seed money within six months of launch.
“For many, this is their first business management tool.”
The sentence is the design philosophy in miniature. If the ledger is the first business tool a trader has ever used, then every screen has to explain itself, and every reminder has to be gentle enough not to embarrass a customer who is late with a payment. The core app was free, and the founders told We Talk Startups that growing the user base came first.
From users to a seed round
In May 2021 CreditBook announced a $1.5 million seed round, which Dawn reported was led by BitRate VC of Pakistan and VentureSouq of the United Arab Emirates. Better Tomorrow Ventures, Ratio Ventures, Quiet Capital, Toy Ventures and i2i Ventures also took part. The company told Dawn it had more than 500,000 users and had grown over 450 percent in six months.
Jamall said then that growth would come from spending time with users, and that the team was learning every day from them while watching macroeconomic trends closely. That is a designer's answer to a growth question: the numbers follow from understanding the person holding the phone.
Whitespace in payments
The pre Series A of December 2021 was Tiger Global's first investment in Pakistan, TechCrunch reported, and also the first South Asian bet for Firstminute Capital. Better Tomorrow Ventures, Banana Capital, VentureSouq, Ratio Ventures and i2i Ventures joined, along with the angel investors Sriram Krishnan and Julian Shapiro. TechCrunch said merchants were using the app in more than 400 towns and cities, and that transacting users had grown tenfold in a year. CreditBook put the unmet financing gap for small businesses at $45 billion.
Jamall was the founder TechCrunch quoted on what came next. She said the company was building financial products on top of the ledger, and that these were not ecommerce. She also told We Talk Startups that the company was moving into invoicing.
“In Pakistan, there is a huge whitespace in payments.”
TechCrunch noted that she was one of a handful of female founders in Pakistan's startup scene. CreditBook's website lists her as cofounder and head of design, and her LinkedIn profile places her in London. In a March 2023 LinkedIn post marking International Women's Day she wrote that her first year as a working mother had only reaffirmed her belief that women everywhere have superpowers.
From a ledger to a lender
The product she designed has changed around her. The company's website says it started with a bookkeeping app and has built a suite of financial solutions that let underserved businesses extend financing to their customers within hours. It describes itself as the only licensed digital lending company for small business financing in Pakistan, and cites a Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan licence issued in 2022 to its subsidiary, CreditBook Financial Services. That is a claim by the company, and this publication has not checked it against the regulator's register.
By its own account CreditBook has reached more than one million small businesses across 400 localities, has extended more than 5,000 instances of financing with an 85 percent renewal rate, and works remote first with a team across three time zones. The same page elsewhere cites a lower figure of more than 2,000 financing instances and does not reconcile the two. It also offers white label, embedded financing to other platforms. The leadership list shows Malik as chief executive, Adamjee as head of operations and Zain Umar as chief executive of the lending subsidiary.
What the design work has to survive
For a designer, the shift from free ledger to lender is both a vindication and a test. The ledger that proved shopkeepers would record their credit is now the source of the data that lets the company decide whom to lend to. But a lending product asks more of a trader than a reminder does. It has to be explained, it carries risk for both sides, and the trust the free app earned has to survive the first late payment on a loan.
Jamall's own history suggests how she would frame that challenge. She began by watching how credit works between neighbours, and the khata she studied was valued because it was personal. How well a licensed, data driven lender keeps that humanity will say more about CreditBook than any user count.
