Brands
FURO Sports Shoes ropes in Shahid Kapoor as its brand ambassador
Mumbai: Red Chief Shoes’ FURO Sports Shoes has announced its much-coveted collaboration with actor Shahid Kapoor.
Shahid’s youthful and sporty personality of affable boy gels with the aspiring core values and ethos of FURO Sports Shoes. Shahid appeals to a wider audience across all age groups. While his exceptional fitness lifestyle, dancing prowess, and romantic-action-oriented movies attract the youth, his responsible family guy persona connects with relatively mature age groups as well.
Speaking of this collaboration, FURO managing director Manoj Gyanchandani said, “We are extremely honoured to welcome Shahid Kapoor as the newest FURO family member. We couldn’t have asked for a better partner in 2022 who comes with such high credible energy which is much needed in such dynamic times to inspire the youth towards athleisure lifestyle. We look forward to a successful partnership with him and hope to have a mutually beneficial long-term relationship.”
Further, FURO marketing head Rahul Sharma added, “To continue leveraging our association both in mass media and digital platforms – Shahid would be part of our forthcoming Brand campaigns, which are back-to-back lined up starting a few weeks from now.”
Brands
Rakesh Menon joins Paytm as avp – lending
Fintech product leader takes on new role after building digital lending, payments and credit products across fintech ecosystem
MUMBAI: Rakesh Menon has joined Paytm as assistant vice president – lending, taking on a new role focused on strengthening the company’s lending and credit products.
Prior to this, Menon worked at Profectus Capital Pvt Ltd as chief manager – payments based financing and digital lending.
At Profectus, he designed and launched digital credit products for merchants with variable cash flows, including overdraft-linked and revenue-share lending models. He led end-to-end LOS–LMS API integrations with payment partners and aggregators, enabling real-time underwriting, disbursal and repayment workflows.
He also worked on funnel optimisation initiatives using journey analytics, improving onboarding, KYC and disbursal conversion by 35 per cent. He developed ecosystem partnerships for transaction-data-based credit assessment and automated settlement systems, and collaborated with credit and data science teams to strengthen risk models and early delinquency detection.
Menon standardised partner onboarding and API frameworks, reducing go-live timelines by 40 per cent and improving digital scalability.
Before Profectus Capital, he worked at PayU as senior manager – presales lead – enterprise business from August 2022 to August 2023. He set up a national presales function for fintech and digital commerce clients, aligning solutions such as EMI, BNPL, BBPS and offer engines to merchant requirements.
He also helped improve conversion rates by around 15 per cent through merchant persona mapping, demo frameworks and structured sales playbooks, working closely with product and go-to-market teams.
From April 2019 to July 2022, Menon served as business unit head – SMB – direct acquisitions at Worldline, where he built the SMB online payments vertical from scratch. The business scaled to Rs 2,500 crore in annual transaction volume, growing at 45 per cent year-on-year.
During this period, he introduced paperless onboarding processes including eKYC and eSign, developed partner dashboards and CRM automation systems, and integrated platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce and Tally to expand merchant adoption.
Across roles, Menon has worked across digital lending, payments and merchant financing, with experience in product development, ecosystem partnerships, API integrations and fintech-led growth strategies.
At Paytm, he will focus on scaling lending products and strengthening digital credit infrastructure within the company’s financial services ecosystem.
His appointment comes as fintech firms continue to expand their lending and embedded finance offerings in a competitive market.
