FinBox

From October 15, some UPI loan repayments will start carrying a fee. AutoPay mandates don't. That one exemption may reshape lending more than any credit regulation this year. Paying manually lets a borrower choose the day. Wait for salary. Skip a thin week. For small-ticket borrowers with volatile income, that timing is a real financial tool. It has just never had a price. Now it does, and the lender pays it. So the rational move is to make repayment automatic. Then make it non-revocable, which is the mandate type borrowers can't pause from their own UPI app. Around 20 million AutoPay mandates are revoked every month, mostly because balances run low. That's what borrowers do with control when they have it. A fee meant to fund UPI infrastructure ends up deciding who controls the repayment date. Mayank Jain digs into this for The Pattern #221 → https://lnkd.in/eZXHB-Wi

Turns out shaping clay is a lot harder than it looks. This Ganesh Chaturthi, Team FinBox in Bengaluru made eco-friendly idols with our own hands. Muddy fingers, lopsided trunks, a lot of laughing, and a quiet moment of pride when each one was finally done. No plaster, no paint, just clay & patience! Janani Sri Foram Buch Arjun Sasidharan Chaitra Nair Eshwar upadhayay Amit Kumar Shriya Pattanayak Murali Krishna Priya Darshini Pandey Nikila Belle Aditya Agnihotri #LifeAtFinBox #GaneshChaturthi #GreenGanesha #Bengaluru

Every lender in India now reads the same credit file. Bureau reporting went weekly in July, and Account Aggregator data backed an estimated ₹3.82 lakh crore of loans in FY26. That's good for borrowers, but for lenders it means the data that once set them apart now reaches every competitor on the same day. AI models are converging too, so the edge has to come from somewhere else: what a lender learns from its own declines, how quickly it can change a policy, and the signals only it holds. That's the decision layer, and it's the one part of the stack a competitor can't buy. Rajat Deshpande talks about where the edge in lending moves once models and data are shared, in the latest edition of The Big Picture. 👇   

Our Head - HR, Foram Buch, is at the Marsh × ETHRWorld roundtable in Bangalore tomorrow — "Human Advantage in the Age of AI: Reinventing Work, Accelerating Decisions." Building AI that makes credit decisions taught us something we didn't expect. Automating the decision is the easy half. The hard half is agreeing what the system is allowed to decide on its own, and who owns an outcome that no human touched. That second half is a human job, and it isn't going anywhere. Curious to hear how the room sees it play out in how work gets designed in the AI-first era. Thanks to Marsh and ET HRWorld for the invite.

The way India buys is changing. So is the way businesses need to sell. Our very own Viraj Shah, Senior Product Manager at FinBox, will be moderating a conversation on exactly that at the Faculty of Management Studies - University of Delhi's Bengaluru Reminiscence Meet 2026. The panel — “Beyond the Funnel: How India is Learning to Buy and Sell Differently” — brings together leaders from Amazon, Meta and Fireside Ventures to unpack what’s changing. Congratulations, Viraj. Looking forward to seeing you steer what should be a fascinating conversation.

What looks ready on paper can look very different once it’s put to work. That’s the idea behind this week’s edition of The Pattern. From conversations with lenders about where AI actually fits into credit, to India’s sharp credit growth and a Supreme Court judgment on loan recovery, Mayank Jain looks at three very different stories that raise the same question: How much of what looks strong has actually been tested? Read here: https://lnkd.in/gCVEbgrT

Two days at MEBIS in Dubai, and we're leaving with more questions worth chasing than we arrived with. We went to listen. What we heard from banks and lenders across the region is that the agentic AI conversation has moved past whether it belongs near a credit decision, and into how it actually runs: who reviews the agent's work, what happens to the queue behind it, and how you hold an audit trail a regulator will accept. The question that came up most often, across almost every conversation: why do so many AI pilots never make it into production? Our view, shaped by what we see in live deployments, is that a pilot is built to prove the model works. Production asks something harder: that the operation around the model works. Ownership, exception handling, audit, and the people whose day it changes. That part rarely gets a budget line, and it's where most pilots stop. On stage, our SVP and head of international business Bindesh Pandey walked through our suite of AI-native digital lending platforms, built so lenders can launch and scale modern credit offerings with speed — and take them all the way into production, not just into a sandbox. The Middle East is a region we're proud to be building in. Some of the world's largest and most ambitious banks are here, and the conversations this week made us more excited, not less, about what we can build alongside them. Thank you to the MEBIS team, and to everyone who stopped by. #MEBIS2026 Rajat Deshpande Srijan Nagar Nikhil Bhawsinka Mayank J. Bindesh Pandey Kunal Breja Rupali Julka Sanoop Sashindran Spandan Bhatnagar Lucky Sharma Anwesh Das Prateek Mohnot Kinjal Bhatt Surabhi Banerjee Shamolie Oberoi Parnika Agarwal Amit Didolkar Radhika Shah Arpan Adarsh Vishal Khajuria

Day 1 at MEBIS brought thoughtful conversations, fresh perspectives, and plenty to take back to the team. At the FinBox booth, we met people from across the industry, exchanged ideas, and heard about the priorities shaping their businesses. The keynotes added to those conversations, with industry leaders sharing their perspectives on AI and its evolving role in financial services. There’s plenty of excitement around what comes next—and plenty to discuss about putting it into practice. Thank you to everyone who stopped by and spent time with us. It was a pleasure connecting. Tomorrow, we come back, ready for action and an insightful presentation by Bindesh Pandey on AI and the future of credit origination and decisioning. #FinBox #MEBIS #AI #FinancialServices Rajat Deshpande Srijan Nagar Nikhil Bhawsinka Bindesh Pandey Kunal Breja Spandan Bhatnagar Prateek Mohnot Lucky Sharma Anwesh Das Amit Didolkar Radhika Shah Kinjal Bhatt Surabhi Banerjee Parnika Agarwal Arpit Gupta Sanoop Sashindran

A credit team's AI approves loans in minutes. If a regulator asked exactly how one decision was made, could they show the reasoning — not just the outcome? Most couldn't. Agentic AI doesn't make one decision per file — it makes dozens, and most credit dashboards only read the last one. In the latest Infinite Loop, Srijan Nagar writes about what it actually takes to monitor an AI credit system — and why that gap won't stay optional for long. Read it here: https://lnkd.in/gVUdwdJm

To everyone who joined FinTech Afterhours at GFF2026, thank you.  350+ senior leaders from BFSI took time out of a packed GFF calendar to spend an evening with us.  That's not something we take lightly. The event, like last year, was built on a simple bet: the real conversations in lending happen off the panel, not on it. That bet paid off. Founders, credit heads and product leaders from across the industry showed up, and the room did what good rooms do, conversations turned into introductions, introductions into plans for next quarter. To everyone who walked in: thank you for making the case that mixers still matter in an industry obsessed with product demos. See you at the next one. Rajat Deshpande Srijan Nagar Nikhil Bhawsinka Amit Didolkar Mayank Jain Bindesh Pandey Jai Rathod Radhika Shah Sonia Bhanushali SARTHAK BISWAL Vamsee Yalamanchi Ankit Chhillar Prathamesh Sawant Ryan Pereira Dishan Jain Dhaval Thakkar Dhananjay Ghatole Rohit Rajput Parul Singh Mayank Tiwari Arpan Adarsh Vishal Khajuria Sanoop Sashindran Nikhil Dhariwal Ruchi Kumari Parikshit Trivedi Parikshit Khokher Fiza Mittal Jeevananth Thangavel Ritura Biswas Kapil Bhagat Ankur Vardia Bindesh Pandey Prateek Mohnot Lucky Sharma Surabhi Banerjee Nitika . Kinjal Bhatt Shamolie Oberoi #FinBox #GFF #GlobalFintechFest #FinTech #CreditInfrastructure