Why the real bottleneck in Indian lending isn’t the model but the weeks it takes to change a rule
By Srijan Nagar, Co-Founder of FinBox
India’s next wave of borrowers is already here. They’re in Surat, Kanpur, Coimbatore, applying for loans through their phones, many of them for the first time. Personal loan applications from smaller cities grew sharply through 2025, and lenders have largely built the tools to assess them. Better models, alternative data, UPI-linked underwriting. The capability to understand these borrowers exists.
The problem is something else entirely.
Even when a lender’s model correctly identifies a creditworthy borrower, the rules that actually drive the approval decision may not reflect that. Those rules, the policy layer sitting between the model and the decision, are updated weeks after the insight that should have changed them. The model learns. The policy doesn’t, not quickly enough.
That gap, between what the data knows and what the system does, is where approvals get missed, where compliant borrowers get turned away, and where...
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