RBI says fintechs are helping narrow India’s MSME credit gap
RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra said cash-flow lending, account aggregators and digital public infrastructure are enabling fintechs to improve MSME credit access, payments, onboarding, fraud detection and financial inclusion.
What happened
Reserve Bank of India · RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra said fintechs are closing India’s MSME credit gap through cash-flow lending, account aggregators and
Key facts
- 7th Global Fintech Festival
- over the past decade
- millions of small businesses
- hundreds of millions of Indians
Why this matters
Banks, retailers and fintech platforms have a clearer mandate to pursue partnerships around embedded credit, digital onboarding and shared MSME data infrastructure.
What to watch
- RBI guidance, speeches or supervisory actions on digital lending, account aggregators, consent management and fintech-bank partnerships.
- Growth in MSME loan originations sourced through payment aggregators, POS providers, B2B marketplaces and merchant apps.
- Account-aggregator consent volumes, successful data pulls and lender conversion rates for MSME borrowers.
- Delinquency trends in short-tenor merchant cash-flow loans, especially among micro-retail, food service and seasonal businesses.
- Expansion of GST, UPI and invoice-data integrations used for underwriting and fraud detection.
- New bank-NBFC-fintech co-lending or embedded-credit partnerships targeting merchants.
- Connect payments, POS, invoicing, GST and bank-data feeds into a unified merchant cash-flow profile where consent architecture permits.
- Offer pre-approved, inventory-linked credit through bank or NBFC partners rather than carrying unsecured credit risk directly.
- Use credit eligibility as an incentive for retailers to adopt digital payment acceptance, e-invoicing, inventory reconciliation and account-aggregator connectivity.
- Segment merchant offers by cash-flow volatility and repayment capacity; avoid using gross sales growth alone as an underwriting signal.
- Strengthen borrower disclosures, consent logs, collections controls and fraud monitoring before scaling digital-credit distribution.