OnEMI Technology Solutions: The Fintech That Refused to Fade

I. The 2026 IPO and the Fintech "Survivor"

On the morning of May 8, 2026, a mid-sized financial-technology company most retail investors had never heard of did something that, in the India of 2026, had become almost unfashionable: it had a good IPO.

The ticker was KISSHT. The parent company was ओन-ईएमआई टेक्नोलॉजी सॉल्यूशंस OnEMI Technology Solutions, and when the bell rang, its shares opened at ₹191 on the BSE against an issue price of ₹171 — a pop of roughly twelve percent — drifting up to close near ₹208 and handing the company a market capitalisation of about ₹3,500 crore, somewhere north of $370 million.¹²⁰ No fireworks. No founder ringing a gong in a hoodie. Just a clean, slightly boring, oversubscribed listing in a market that had spent three years learning to distrust the word "fintech."

To understand why that was remarkable, you have to remember the graveyard it walked out of. The Indian digital-lending boom of 2019 to 2021 produced a generation of glossy apps promising instant credit to the next half-billion borrowers. Most of them are gone. Some were Chinese-funded loan sharks running 3,000-percent annualised interest and sending recovery agents to harass borrowers' families.⁸ Some were well-meaning unicorns that discovered, the hard way, that lending without a balance sheet and without a regulator's blessing is not a business — it's a marketing campaign with credit risk attached. ZestMoney, once the poster child of "buy-now-pay-later" in India, effectively wound down. The down-round became the dominant genre of fintech press release.

And in the middle of that wreckage stood किश्त Kissht — a name borrowed from the Hindi and Urdu word kisht (किश्त), meaning "installment," the small, dignified monthly payment that lets an ordinary household buy a ₹15,000 smartphone or a refrigerator without a credit card.⁷ Its parent, OnEMI, was not the flashiest fintech in India. It was, arguably, one of the few that behaved less like a software startup and more like what it actually was: a regulated lender wearing an app.

This is the story of how it got there. It is a story about two McKinsey consultants who looked at India's "credit gap" and made an unusual bet — that the boring path, the regulated path, the path of owning a non-banking finance company licence and answering to the भारतीय रिज़र्व बैंक Reserve Bank of India, would in the end be the only path that survived. It is a story about a near-death experience in February 2023, when the government of India accidentally put Kissht on a blacklist of Chinese apps and the founders had forty-eight hours to prove they were Indian. And it is a story about a pivot — from one-off installment loans to a daily-use credit app called रिंग RING that rode the single largest financial-infrastructure boom in human history: India's Unified Payments Interface.

It is worth pausing on what "fintech survivor" actually means in the Indian context, because the casualty list is long enough to be its own cautionary genre. The 2020–2022 window saw money pour into anything that could spell "credit" and "app" in the same pitch deck. Then came the triple squeeze: the RBI's digital-lending crackdown that outlawed whole business models, a global venture funding winter that turned off the capital tap, and a rising-rate environment that made the cost of borrowed money — the lender's raw material — suddenly expensive. Companies that had been valued on user growth discovered that users without repayment are just losses with a download. The ones that died were not, for the most part, frauds. They were businesses that had optimised for the wrong thing: scale before unit economics, growth before a licence, a multiple before a moat. OnEMI is interesting precisely because it optimised for the unfashionable things first, and the fashionable things — scale, a brand, a public listing — arrived later, as a consequence of the boring choices rather than a substitute for them.

From two consultants and a thesis about the "real India," to the secret weapon of an NBFC licence, to the pivot to RING and a 2026 IPO that priced itself with almost suspicious modesty — let's get into it.

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II. Origins: The McKinsey Pedigree and the "OnEMI" Vision

Picture a McKinsey project room in Mumbai around 2014. Two consultants, both products of the Indian elite-education pipeline, are staring at the same problem from opposite ends of a spreadsheet — and slowly realising they want to quit their jobs.

The first is रणवीर सिंह Ranvir Singh, a mechanical engineer out of IIT Bombay who went on to do his management diploma at IIM Bangalore, the kind of pedigree that, in India, is roughly equivalent to "MIT plus Harvard Business School" as a social signal. He had spent his career between consulting and finance, with stints that would later include McKinsey and a finance venture before Kissht.² The second is कृष्णन विश्वनाथन Krishnan Vishwanathan — an electrical engineer from IIT Delhi who went west for an MBA at Yale, with a background that ran through semiconductors at Analog Devices and Silicon Access Networks before he, too, landed at McKinsey.³ One was the deal-and-distribution mind; the other was the quant and the systems builder. Both had spent years inside the world's most prestigious consultancy advising banks on exactly the problem they were about to attack themselves.

That problem was the "credit gap," and the numbers around it were almost absurd. India in 2015 was a country of more than 1.3 billion people with, by most counts, fewer than 25 million active credit cards. Credit, the lifeblood of consumption in the West, was a luxury good reserved for the salaried, urban top sliver of the population — perhaps the top one to two percent who could satisfy a bank's underwriting. Everyone else — the shopkeeper in Indore, the schoolteacher in Nagpur, the delivery rider in Surat — lived in a cash economy where the only way to buy something you couldn't afford this month was the local moneylender or an awkward conversation with a relative.

To feel the size of that gap, you have to abandon the Western intuition that credit is ambient — that a card arrives in your mailbox at eighteen, that a bureau score follows you like a shadow, that "buy now, pay later" is a checkbox at checkout. None of that infrastructure existed for most Indians. The credit bureaus did exist, but they could only score people who already had credit — a chicken-and-egg trap that locked out anyone trying to borrow for the first time. The banks, meanwhile, were structurally allergic to the small-ticket, thin-file customer: the cost of underwriting a ₹15,000 loan the traditional way — paperwork, branch visits, manual verification — was higher than the profit on the loan itself. So the banks simply didn't bother, and a vast, creditworthy population was left to the moneylender. The entire opportunity, the consultants realised, was a problem of cost-to-serve. If you could underwrite a tiny loan in minutes instead of days, using a phone instead of a branch, you could profitably serve a market the banks had written off as uneconomic. That was the arbitrage. The hard part was the underwriting.

Here is the question that became OnEMI's founding obsession. A young man walks into an electronics shop in a tier-2 city to buy a ₹15,000 smartphone. He earns enough to pay ₹2,500 a month. He has no credit card, no credit bureau history, no salary slip a bank would respect. How do you give him that phone, on installments, in the four minutes he's standing at the counter — and not lose your shirt when one in twenty borrowers doesn't pay you back?

The answer the founders gravitated toward was data and speed, but data of an unconventional kind. With no bureau score to lean on, the early underwriting had to triangulate creditworthiness from whatever digital exhaust a customer would consent to share — the texture of their phone usage, their transaction patterns, the device they carried, the consistency of their behaviour. This is the unglamorous machinery beneath every "instant approval" screen: a model trained to predict, in the time it takes a counter clerk to wrap a phone, whether this particular stranger will pay you back. Get the model right and you unlock a market no one else can reach profitably. Get it wrong and you've simply built a very efficient machine for giving money away. The difference between those two outcomes — the default rate, measured to the basis point — is the entire game, and it is a game you can only learn to win by playing it for years and accumulating the scars.

The two consultants founded the company in 2015 to answer exactly that.¹ The first incarnation was checkout finance — sitting at the point of sale, physical and digital, and converting a purchase into an EMI on the spot. (Trivia for the diligence-minded: the Android app's package identifier to this day reads com.fastbanking, and "Fastbanking" survives as a Kissht-branded domain — a fossil suggesting an earlier working name, though OnEMI has never, in any filing this analysis could verify, formally narrated a "rebrand" story. Treat the founding-myth tidiness with appropriate suspicion.) What is documented is the strategic shift the name Kissht came to represent: a move away from merely being a matchmaker that introduced borrowers to third-party lenders, and toward owning the customer — the underwriting decision, the interest rate, the collection, the relationship.

That distinction sounds like a footnote. It was the whole company. In the 2015–2018 wave of Indian fintech, the fashionable model was "asset-light" — be a platform, take an origination fee, let someone else's balance sheet carry the loan and someone else's licence carry the regulator. It was capital-efficient and venture-friendly and, as the next decade proved, structurally fragile. OnEMI's founders, having spent years inside the banks, understood something their peers underrated: in lending, the person who controls the underwriting and holds the risk controls the economics. Everyone else is a vendor.

There is a tell in Ranvir Singh's own positioning that captures the company's self-image. He was a founding member of the Fintech Association for Consumer Empowerment, the industry body that lobbied for — and helped shape — responsible digital-lending norms.² Read that the cynical way and it is regulatory capture; read it the way the company would, and it is a lender choosing to help write the rules of the road rather than wait to be policed by them. Either way, it tells you where the founders placed their bets: not on staying ahead of the regulator, but on standing next to it. For a pair of ex-consultants who had spent years advising banks on how regulation actually works in practice, that was less a moral stance than a competitive one. They had seen which financial institutions endure, and it is never the ones sprinting along the regulatory margin.

So they raised money — early backing from Endiya Partners came in around 2017, with the firm describing Kissht as a "technology-first consumer lender" for the new-to-credit⁴ — and they started buying the most unglamorous asset in the entire fintech universe. Not engineers. Not a brand. A licence.

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III. The Strategic "Wedge": The NBFC Licence Gamble

In the fintech zeitgeist of 2017 and 2018, applying for your own non-banking financial company licence was a slightly embarrassing thing to admit at a startup dinner. It signalled that you didn't quite get it. The whole point of being a "platform," the orthodoxy went, was to avoid becoming a regulated balance sheet — to stay light, scale fast, and let the legacy NBFCs and banks do the boring, capital-hungry work of actually holding loans while you collected the spread and the multiple.

OnEMI went the other way. It built its lending around सी क्रेवा Si Creva Capital Services, an RBI-registered NBFC, and made it a wholly owned subsidiary — the engine that would do the disbursing, the KYC, the underwriting, and the EMI collection.¹⁵ In an industry sprinting to be capital-light, OnEMI deliberately strapped on the heaviest object available.

First, a plain-language detour, because the abbreviation "NBFC" hides a concept that is central to everything that follows. A non-banking financial company is, roughly, a lender that is allowed to lend but not allowed to take deposits from the public the way a bank can. It is regulated by the RBI, it has to maintain capital against its loans, it has to report and provision and submit to inspection — but it funds itself by borrowing money (from banks, from debt markets, from funds) and lending it onward, rather than by holding your savings account. Think of it as a licensed lending business without the cheque-book and ATM apparatus of a full bank. In India, NBFCs have historically done a huge share of the actual work of consumer credit, precisely because they could move faster and reach further than the lumbering public-sector banks. Owning one is the difference between being a lender and referring customers to a lender.

Why does that matter so much? Because the founders had run the second-order logic. A licence is not a checkbox; it is a control surface. If you own the NBFC, you set the interest rate rather than negotiating it. You design the underwriting model rather than living inside someone else's risk appetite. You decide collection policy rather than inheriting a partner's reputation when their recovery agents misbehave. And — this is the part that mattered most, though almost nobody priced it in 2018 — you exist inside the regulatory perimeter rather than in the grey zone just outside it. When the rules eventually came, and in lending the rules always eventually come, you would be standing on the right side of the wall.

There was also a less obvious cost to the choice, and it is worth naming because it explains why so few of OnEMI's peers made the same call. Owning an NBFC is capital-intensive in a way that pure platforms are not. Every loan you hold on your own books has to be backed by regulatory capital; grow the book and you have to keep raising equity to support it, which dilutes founders and disciplines growth. A pure-play platform that merely refers borrowers to someone else's balance sheet has no such constraint — it can scale loan volume without scaling its own capital, which is exactly why venture investors loved the model and exactly why it looked so much better on a growth chart. OnEMI accepted slower, capital-constrained growth in exchange for control and durability. In 2018 that looked like a handicap. By 2024 it looked like the only sane way to have built the thing. The founders, in effect, were running a different game than their peers — optimising for the franchise that would still be standing in a decade, not the valuation that would print next quarter.

The early capital reflected the patience of that strategy. Vertex Ventures, the Singapore-based fund anchored by Temasek's ecosystem, led a $30 million Series C alongside Sistema Asia Fund, with Fosun, Ventureast and Endiya participating.⁵ Later, a larger $80 million round arrived, led by Vertex Growth and the Brunei Investment Agency, explicitly framed around pushing into the BNPL and cards segment.⁶ These were real institutions, but the cadence was deliberate — supportive growth capital, not the frantic, valuation-doubling-every-six-months treadmill that some peers rode.

And that is the part of the OnEMI origin story that looks smartest in hindsight and felt dumbest at the time. Through the hype years, Kissht was a relative laggard on the one metric Silicon Valley and its Indian imitators worshipped: paper valuation. While a competitor like ZestMoney was being crowned a near-unicorn and feted on magazine covers, OnEMI looked under-loved, over-regulated, and a little slow. The founders had taken the boring slot in a casino where the loud tables were paying out. The thesis — that the regulator was not an obstacle to route around but the moat to build behind — would not be vindicated by a funding announcement. It would be vindicated by survival. The test came sooner, and more violently, than anyone expected.

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IV. The Inflection Point: The 2023 MeitY Ban and the Redemption

It started, as these things do, with a customer-service alert and a feeling of dread.

In the first days of February 2023, India's इलेक्ट्रॉनिकी और सूचना प्रौद्योगिकी मंत्रालय Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology — MeitY — moved to block 232 mobile applications: 138 betting and gambling apps and 94 digital-lending apps, the vast majority alleged to have Chinese links and predatory practices.⁸ The context was genuinely ugly. Investigators had been chasing a wave of fly-by-night loan apps that lent small sums and then weaponised the borrower's phone contacts, threatening and shaming people into repaying at annualised rates that ran into the thousands of percent. Acting on a Ministry of Home Affairs direction, MeitY swung the axe. As a piece of policy intent, it was defensible.

As a piece of execution, it was a sledgehammer. Swept up in the list of "Chinese-linked" apps were several thoroughly Indian businesses — PayU's LazyPay, KreditBee, and, to the genuine bewilderment of its founders, Kissht.⁹ Overnight, an RBI-registered, Indian-owned, Mumbai-headquartered lender found itself publicly branded, in effect, a foreign predatory app. A Kissht spokesperson's first reaction captured the surrealism: the app and website were still working for customers, the company had no Chinese stakeholders whatsoever, and management genuinely did not understand what had triggered the notice.⁹

What followed was the kind of forty-eight-hour fire drill that decides whether a lending company lives or dies. For a lender, a "Chinese app" label is not a PR problem; it is an extinction event. Banks and debt funds that provide your lending capital freeze. Partners distance themselves. The credit bureau relationships wobble. Every borrower who reads the news wonders whether they still have to repay. The founders did the only thing that mattered: they went to prove, document by document, what they had spent eight years building toward — that Kissht was Indian-owned, that its data sat in India, that the lending happened inside a registered NBFC, and that there was no Chinese name anywhere on the cap table that mattered.

It is hard to overstate the existential dread of those days for anyone running a lending book. Unlike a software outage, which you can fix and apologise for, a "blocked as a Chinese app" designation attacks the one thing a lender cannot operate without: the willingness of capital providers and borrowers to keep transacting with you. Picture the internal war room. The treasury team is fielding panicked calls from lending partners asking whether their money is safe. The legal team is trying to obtain the actual blocking order — which, in the chaotic style of such actions, was not always cleanly served. The communications team is watching the company's name appear in national headlines next to genuine loan-shark operations. And the founders are trying to get in front of the right officials in Delhi to make a case that should never have needed making. Every hour that the "Chinese app" label stood unchallenged was an hour in which a banking relationship could quietly decide to never come back.

The crucial detail — the one that makes this a strategy story and not just a survival story — is why they could prove it so fast. RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das had earlier noted that the central bank had handed the government a list of apps operating with and through registered NBFCs.¹¹ OnEMI was on the right list. Because Kissht's lending ran through Si Creva, a regulated entity already known to and registered with the RBI, the compliance file practically wrote itself. There was nothing to scramble to invent; the architecture had been built years earlier precisely so that, on a day like this, the answer to "prove you are legitimate" would be a folder, not a prayer. The companies that did not survive that February were, overwhelmingly, the ones who could not produce such a folder — either because they genuinely had something to hide, or because they had never built the architecture that would let them prove they didn't. Innocence is not enough when you cannot document it.

Within days, MeitY revoked the blocking orders on a clutch of Indian apps — LazyPay, Kissht, and several others — after the firms demonstrated they had no Chinese linkage.¹⁰ Ranvir Singh's public statement was gracious and pointed: he thanked the government and MeitY for revoking the order, and framed Kissht as exactly the kind of "credible and fully compliant" app that financial inclusion needed.¹¹ Read that quote again with a strategist's ear. He wasn't just expressing relief. He was planting a flag: we are the compliant ones.

That is the alchemy of the episode. The ban was meant to kill predatory apps; in misfiring, it handed the survivors a brand asset money cannot buy. After February 2023, Kissht could credibly tell every banking partner, every regulator, and every borrower that it had been examined by the Indian state at the highest level of scrutiny — and cleared. Dozens of genuinely shady competitors were wiped off the Play Store permanently. Kissht walked out "government-vetted." A near-death experience had been converted into a moat.

And it dovetailed with a regulatory shift the founders had effectively pre-empted. Five months earlier, on September 2, 2022, the RBI had issued its landmark Guidelines on Digital Lending, requiring, among other things, that loans be disbursed directly into the borrower's bank account with no opaque pass-through pooling, and that platform fees be borne by the regulated lender rather than quietly extracted from the borrower.¹² For grey-zone players, these rules were a compliance earthquake that rendered whole business models illegal. For a company that had already chosen to live inside the perimeter, they were a tailwind — a regulator forcibly converting the entire industry to the exact architecture OnEMI had bet on in 2018. The wall around the moat just got taller. Which raised the obvious next question: now that you had survived, how would you actually grow?

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V. The "RING" Revolution: Shifting to Transactional Credit

Here is the structural problem with installment lending, and it is the problem that quietly kills most lenders that don't see it coming: a great EMI loan is a one-time event.

A customer buys a phone, takes a twelve-month loan, pays it off, and then — vanishes. To grow, you have to find them all over again, or find someone new, and customer acquisition in Indian fintech is brutally expensive. You spend ₹800, ₹1,000, sometimes more, to acquire a borrower, you make a thin margin on a single small-ticket loan, and then the relationship goes dormant. It's a leaky bucket. You can pour marketing money in forever and the level barely rises. The unit economics of "personal loans as transactions" are a treadmill set to a cruel incline.

OnEMI's answer, launched in 2022, was रिंग RING — and the conceptual leap it represented is the most important strategic move in this entire story. RING reframed credit not as an event but as a utility. Instead of "take a loan to buy a thing," the pitch became "carry a credit line in your pocket and tap it for everyday spending." By September 2022, RING was already live across more than 300,000 offline merchants, letting a customer scan a QR code at the corner store and pay through the UPI rails — BHIM, PhonePe, Paytm, Amazon Pay — using borrowed money instead of money they had.¹³

To appreciate why this was clever, you need to understand the single most important piece of plumbing in modern India: यूनिफाइड पेमेंट्स इंटरफेस UPI, the Unified Payments Interface. Think of UPI as a free, instant, government-backed rail that connects every bank account in India to every other one, addressable by a simple ID, settling in seconds, at a scale — tens of billions of transactions a month — that dwarfs every card network on earth combined. Where the West built its digital-payments world on top of the card networks — Visa, Mastercard, the interchange fees that fund all those airline points — India leapfrogged the card entirely and built a public utility instead. A street vendor selling ₹20 of vegetables accepts UPI from a sticker QR code. A billionaire pays the same way. UPI made the act of paying effortless and free for a billion people. But here is the gap that RING drove a truck through: UPI moves your own money. What UPI did not natively do, for most of its life, was lend. The grocery-store tap, the fuel pump, the electricity bill — all that glorious daily-transaction volume ran on debit-like rails, drawing down a balance you already had, touching no credit product at all.

The strategic significance of this is easy to miss if you're not steeped in payments. For years, the holy grail of Indian fintech was figuring out how to layer credit onto the UPI rail — to let people borrow through the same effortless tap they used to pay. The regulator eventually blessed a formal version of this (credit lines on UPI), but the players who moved early, building the borrower experience and the underwriting before the category was crowded, captured the behavioural head start. RING was one of those early movers. It understood that the prize was not a better loan product; it was presence — being the credit option that surfaces at the exact instant of everyday spending, so that "should I borrow for this?" and "should I pay for this?" collapse into a single tap.

RING's insight was to slide a credit line underneath the UPI tap. "Credit-on-UPI." Suddenly a loan wasn't a once-a-year ordeal involving paperwork; it was the default payment method for buying vegetables, topping up fuel, and paying the mobile bill. And that changes the math completely. The fatal flaw of personal lending — that the customer disappears after one transaction — is replaced by its mirror image. A daily-spending tool generates high-frequency, repeat engagement, with the kind of 80-to-90-percent repeat behaviour that lending businesses can usually only dream about. The same expensive customer you fought to acquire now transacts with you dozens of times a month, generating a continuous stream of data and a continuous stream of small, high-frequency credit usage. The acquisition cost gets amortised across years of activity instead of a single loan. The leaky bucket gets a lid.

The scale followed. By its own account, the RING platform reached tens of millions of users — its consumer-facing pages cite figures in the range of 53 million users and over ₹4,000 crore disbursed¹⁴ — and group-level, OnEMI reported roughly 63.7 million registered users and about 11.2 million active customers as of December 31, 2025, up from 53.2 million registered and 9.2 million active just nine months earlier.²¹ RING became the growth engine; reporting around the IPO cited RING as contributing on the order of 70 percent of revenue, a figure that traces back to the FY23 period and should be read as period-specific rather than a permanent constant.²¹

There is a subtler benefit to the daily-use model that compounds quietly: it turns a lender into a learning system. Every grocery tap, every fuel top-up, every utility payment is a fresh data point on whether this customer's financial life is stable or deteriorating — months before a missed EMI would ever show up. A traditional personal lender meets the borrower once, at origination, and then flies blind until something goes wrong. RING watches the borrower's everyday behaviour continuously, which means it can raise a good customer's limit early, tighten a wobbling one before the default, and price risk dynamically rather than once. In credit, the cost of being late to recognise deterioration is enormous; the cost of recognising it early is enormous savings. High-frequency engagement is, in that sense, not just a marketing advantage but a risk-management advantage — arguably the more valuable of the two.

That last caveat matters, because the RING-as-saviour narrative has a sharp edge we'll return to. A daily-use credit utility is a beautiful thing when borrowers repay and capital is cheap. It is a more anxious thing when the macro turns. But strategically, the verdict is hard to argue with: OnEMI took a one-shot product and turned it into a habit. And habits, in consumer finance, are where the real money — and the real moat — live. The trouble is, a habit-driven consumer-credit app is still, at its core, unsecured lending to thin-file borrowers. Which is precisely why the company spent 2025 quietly building something underneath it.

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VI. The "Hidden" Businesses: Merchants, Secured Lending, and Co-Lending

If RING is the part of OnEMI that gets the headlines, the more interesting parts of the company in 2026 are the ones that don't. Peel back the consumer app and you find a lender that has been busily diversifying away from its own riskiest instincts — and doing it through three quietly significant moves.

The first is the merchant ecosystem, and it reframes what OnEMI even is. The company is not purely a business-to-consumer lender shouting at borrowers through ad campaigns. It is, increasingly, a business-to-business-to-consumer rail: it equips the small shopkeeper — the electronics dealer, the appliance store, the local retailer across more than a hundred thousand offline and online points — with the ability to offer EMI to their own walk-in customers.¹⁷ There is a reason this channel matters far beyond the convenience it offers shoppers. Customer acquisition is the single largest cost in consumer lending, and the merchant network inverts the usual economics of it. Instead of OnEMI paying a digital platform to put an ad in front of a stranger and hoping that stranger both wants credit and qualifies for it, the merchant delivers a customer who is already at the point of purchase, with demonstrated intent and a specific need. The acquisition cost is effectively subsidised by the merchant's own desire to close the sale. And because the merchant sees the same customers repeatedly, the relationship compounds: the shopkeeper becomes a distribution node, a soft collection agent (a local face the borrower will not lightly disappoint), and a source of ground-truth about the customer that no algorithm can fully replicate. It is the closest a digital lender gets to the old wisdom of village banking — lending to people your local agent actually knows — at national scale. Si Creva itself describes its model as empowering merchant stores to provide installments at the counter, operating through a franchisee network of Kissht-branded distribution points concentrated in exactly the tier-2 and tier-3 cities where the credit gap is widest.¹⁵ The shopkeeper sells more refrigerators because financing is available; OnEMI acquires a borrower at the precise moment of purchase intent, with the lowest possible acquisition cost, because the merchant is doing the distribution. It is a far more defensible customer-acquisition channel than buying clicks.

The second move is the one that signals real institutional maturity: the push into secured lending. In March 2025, OnEMI launched Loan Against Property — LAP.⁷ Sit with how large a leap that is. The company's heritage is in unsecured tickets that start around ₹15,000; LAP is a secured product against real estate that runs up to ₹30 lakh, lent against as much as 70 percent of a property's value over tenures stretching to fifteen years.¹⁷ These are not the same business with a bigger number attached. Unsecured small-ticket lending is high-yield, high-loss, short-duration, and brutally sensitive to the credit cycle. Secured property lending is lower-yield but vastly safer, longer-duration, and — crucially — it gives the lender collateral to fall back on. For a company whose entire risk profile had been unsecured consumer credit, LAP is a margin-of-safety buffer and a statement of intent: we want to be a durable lender, not a fair-weather one. By September 2025, LAP already accounted for about four percent of Si Creva's assets under management, built out across more than 75 branches, with the average loan tenure across the book stretching from under three months in FY24 to nearly ten months in FY25 as the mix shifted toward longer, more stable credit.¹⁶

The third move is the most financially elegant: co-lending. Rather than fund every loan off its own balance sheet — which would require endless equity and constrain growth — Si Creva originates loans and then shares them with larger institutions, acting as the sourcing-and-servicing engine while a bank or a bigger NBFC provides the bulk of the capital. The roster of partners reads like a directory of Indian credit: Northern Arc, MAS Financial Services, Piramal Finance, SMFG, Suryoday Small Finance Bank, Utkarsh Small Finance Bank, Aditya Birla Capital, Vivriti Capital — north of twenty financial institutions in all.¹⁷¹⁸ By September 2025, these co-lending arrangements had swelled to about ₹2,717 crore, or roughly 49 percent of Si Creva's ₹5,533 crore AUM, up from about ₹1,129 crore eighteen months earlier.¹⁶ Read that again: nearly half the book is funded with partners rather than purely off OnEMI's own equity. The company earns fee and spread income on portfolios it originates but doesn't fully carry — a capital-efficient flywheel that lets it grow faster than its own balance sheet alone would allow, while keeping skin in the game so the underwriting stays honest.

Co-lending deserves a moment of plain explanation, because it is the mechanism that makes a small lender behave like a big one. Imagine you are good at finding and assessing borrowers but you don't have unlimited money to lend them. A bank has the opposite problem: oceans of cheap capital but limited reach into the small-town, thin-file customer. Co-lending marries the two. Si Creva originates the loan, does the KYC and the underwriting, and keeps a slice — typically a meaningful minority — on its own books. A partner bank or larger NBFC funds the rest. Si Creva then services the whole loan, collecting EMIs and managing the relationship, and earns a fee plus a spread for doing so. The genius of the structure is that Si Creva keeps "skin in the game" — it holds enough of each loan that it cannot afford to underwrite carelessly — while funding most of the growth with someone else's balance sheet. It is the capital-light dream the early platform fintechs chased, except achieved from inside the regulatory perimeter, with a licence and an underwriting track record that make banks willing to partner. That a roster of names like SMFG and Piramal will put their capital behind Si Creva's origination is itself a credential: these are institutions that diligence their partners carefully, and their participation is a market signal about the quality of Kissht's underwriting.¹⁶¹⁷

Stitched together with an insurance cross-sell — personal-accident cover up to ₹10 lakh underwritten in partnership with Aditya Birla Health Insurance, plus a digital-gold product¹⁴⁷ — what emerges is not an app but a diversified, regulated credit institution that happens to acquire customers through a slick UPI front end. The credit ratings agencies noticed. In February 2026, CRISIL upgraded Si Creva's long-term rating to A- with a stable outlook, up from BBB+, and its short-term rating to A1 — a genuine vote of confidence in the franchise's stability just months before the IPO.¹⁶ That upgrade is not a footnote for investors; a ratings notch directly lowers the cost of the debt that funds the lending, which feeds straight back into margin. The question that move sets up is the one the market would have to price: what is all of this actually worth?

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VII. Playbook: Capital Deployment and the Founder Signal

Every IPO has a tell — a small action by the people who know the company best that says more than the prospectus. OnEMI's came in early March 2026, and it is worth getting exactly right, because the popular version of it is wrong by a factor of ten.

The myth, repeated in an early headline and then quietly corrected, was that founders Ranvir Singh and Krishnan Vishwanathan bought out early investors to the tune of ₹400 crore-plus just before the IPO — a thunderous vote of confidence. The reality, once the typo was fixed, is more modest and, frankly, more interesting. On March 4, 2026, the two founders bought roughly ₹40 crore of stock in pre-IPO secondary trades: Ranvir Singh picked up about 17.7 lakh shares for around ₹35.5 crore from early shareholders including Abhijit Bhandari and AION Advisory, while Krishnan Vishwanathan bought about 2.6 lakh shares for some ₹5.3 crore from Vertex's SEA fund and VenturEast.²² The number that matters isn't the ₹40 crore — it's the price. They paid ₹201 a share. Weeks later, they priced the IPO at ₹171. The founders bought their own company, from their own early backers, at an eighteen-percent premium to the price at which they would soon sell it to the public.

Think about the signalling there. The conventional pre-IPO move is for insiders to cash out at the richest valuation they can justify. OnEMI's founders did the opposite: they leaned in, above the strike price, in a documented transaction the whole market could see. It tells you two things. First, they believe the listed price is conservative. Second — and this is the cultural fingerprint of the whole company — they were willing to under-price the IPO rather than squeeze the last rupee out of public investors on day one.

Because under-price it they did, at least relative to the hype-era playbook. Consider the journey. The IPO was a roughly ₹926 crore offering — an ₹850 crore fresh issue (trimmed down from an originally proposed ₹1,000 crore) plus a small ₹76 crore offer for sale — priced in a band of ₹162 to ₹171, valuing the company at about ₹3,062 crore at the top of the band.¹⁹ Now set that against the private market. This was not a company priced for a moonshot. After years of building a regulated lender through a near-death ban and a brutal industry shakeout, OnEMI came to market at a valuation that, in dollar terms, sat in the mid-$300-million range — a far cry from the billion-dollar paper valuations that vaporised across the sector. The discipline was the point. Where so much of 2021-vintage fintech treated valuation as a scoreboard, OnEMI treated it as a liability to be grown into.

How should an investor even think about what a lender like this is worth? This is where the comps get instructive, and where the right mental model differs sharply from valuing a software company. A SaaS business is valued on revenue multiples because its marginal cost is near zero. A lender is not that; it is, at bottom, a spread business whose value is anchored to its book and its return on equity. The cleaner lens is price-to-book — what you pay for each rupee of the lender's net worth — adjusted for how profitably that book compounds and how clean it stays. The gold-standard benchmark in India is Bajaj Finance बजाज फाइनेंस, which for years commanded a premium price-to-book multiple that the market justified by its extraordinary, durable return on equity and decades of pristine asset quality — the proof that a consumer lender can be a compounding machine rather than a cyclical landmine. At the other end sit the digital-first challengers: Navi नवी, the Sachin Bansal venture chasing a lending-and-payments super-app; KreditBee, the small-ticket personal-loan specialist; and the giants circling from payments, PhonePe and Jio Financial Services. OnEMI came to market priced nowhere near a Bajaj multiple — appropriately, since it has neither the scale nor the multi-cycle track record — but at a level that asked public investors to underwrite improvement rather than perfection. The implicit pitch was: pay a modest multiple for a clean, growing book run by aligned founders, and let the compounding and the secured-lending mix do the work.

The market's response validated the modesty. The book was roughly nine times oversubscribed, with institutional investors — the supposedly sophisticated money — piling in at nearly 25 times their allotment, while the anchor round on April 29, 2026 pulled ₹277.77 crore from 22 institutions at the ₹171 strike.²⁰ The twelve-percent listing pop wasn't a fluke; it was the gap between a deliberately conservative price and what buyers were actually willing to pay. For early backer Endiya Partners, the listing delivered its maiden public-market exit from its first fund — a tidy vindication of a 2017 bet — with Vertex and others also trimming through the offer for sale.²⁰

There is a second-layer signal worth flagging in the share register itself. The selling investors in the offer for sale were the venture funds whose ten-year clocks had run out — Vertex, Endiya, and others reaching the natural end of their fund lives — rather than founders or operators bailing on the story. That distinction matters. When the people leaving are financial investors hitting a structural exit deadline, and the people staying (and buying more) are the founders running the business, the ownership transition reads as healthy rotation rather than a smart-money cash-out. It is the opposite of the pattern that should worry a public investor, which is operators heading for the door while retail piles in.

Two more details complete the capital picture. The proceeds were not destined for a marketing splurge: ₹637.5 crore of the fresh issue was earmarked to be infused straight into Si Creva, fortifying the NBFC's capital base so it can lend more — equity going to where the regulated balance sheet needs it, not to vanity.¹⁹ And the ownership structure is unusually clean by Indian-fintech standards. After years of dilution, the founders still held a combined 32.3 percent — Singh at 18.78 percent, Vishwanathan at 13.52 percent¹⁹ — a level of founder skin-in-the-game that aligns them squarely with public shareholders rather than leaving them as minority operators of someone else's company.

The one blemish, and an instructive one, sits with a famous name. Cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar came on as a strategic investor and brand ambassador, acquiring convertible preference shares across tranches in 2025 at an effective price that — post-split — worked out far above the IPO band, leaving him sitting on a notional loss at listing.²³ It's a useful reminder that a celebrity cap-table entry is a marketing asset first and an investment thesis second. But it also underlines the company's discipline from another angle: even a marquee private investor paid up, and the IPO still priced below where the smart private money had come in. Which brings us to the harder question. Modesty is admirable, but is the moat real? Time to war-game it.

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VIII. Frameworks: The Moat Under the Microscope

Strip away the IPO theatre and the question for a long-term owner is brutally simple: what stops someone bigger, richer, and faster from doing this and crushing OnEMI? Run it through the two frameworks that matter — Michael Porter's Five Forces and Hamilton Helmer's Seven Powers — and a clear picture emerges of where the company is genuinely protected and where it is dangerously exposed.

Start with Porter, and the force that defines this entire business: the threat of new entrants, which is unusually low — and that is the heart of the bull case. Three years ago, anyone with a developer and a marketing budget could launch a lending app. After the RBI's 2022 digital-lending directions and the MeitY purge of 2023, that door slammed shut. To lend at scale in India today you need a regulated NBFC licence, a compliant disbursement architecture, bureau relationships, and a clean bill of health from a regulator that has demonstrated it will blacklist you on suspicion. OnEMI has all of it, battle-tested. The regulatory wall that nearly killed the company is now the very thing that keeps challengers out. Rivalry among existing players, by contrast, is intense — Bajaj Finance बजाज फाइनेंस, the colossus of Indian consumer lending, plus a field of digital-first lenders — but rivalry among the licensed and surviving is a far smaller, more rational club than the free-for-all of 2020.

The bargaining power of suppliers is the most underappreciated risk, and for a lender, the key "supplier" is capital itself. OnEMI's raw material is debt — money borrowed from banks and debt funds and then lent onward at a spread. When credit markets tighten or its own ratings wobble, that cost rises and the margin compresses, and the lender has limited power to resist. This is precisely why the CRISIL upgrade to A- matters so much, and why ₹637.5 crore of IPO money is flowing into Si Creva's capital base: both actions are about lowering and stabilising the cost of the single most important input.¹⁶¹⁹ On the other side, the bargaining power of buyers — the borrowers — is individually negligible but collectively rising, as PhonePe फोनपे, Jio जियो फाइनेंशियल सर्विसेज Jio Financial Services and others train Indian consumers to expect credit-on-UPI as a free-feeling commodity. And the threat of substitutes is real and structural: the borrower's own UPI debit balance, a relative's loan, or a rival's cheaper credit line are all one tap away.

Now Helmer's Seven Powers, which gets at the more durable question of why margins persist. The cleanest power OnEMI holds is counter-positioning — the classic challenger move where the incumbent can't copy you without damaging its own business. RING's credit-on-UPI sits in exactly the spot a traditional bank's credit-card franchise cannot comfortably follow: it serves thin-file, small-ticket, tier-2 customers that the card business was structurally built to exclude, using free UPI rails that undercut the entire interchange-fee economics a card issuer depends on. A bank chasing RING's customer would have to cannibalise its own card profit pool — the textbook counter-positioning bind.

The second power is scale economies, expressed here as a data flywheel rather than a manufacturing curve. Every transaction across tens of millions of users and a book that grew to ₹5,533 crore feeds an underwriting model that learns who repays and who doesn't.¹⁶ Better data lowers default rates; lower defaults allow finer pricing and faster approvals; that wins more customers, which generates more data. For new-to-credit borrowers with no bureau file, this proprietary behavioural data is arguably the single hardest asset for a competitor to replicate, because it can only be accumulated by lending to these people for years and watching what happens. The third and subtlest power is a cornered resource that doesn't appear on any balance sheet: the founders' "regulatory IQ." The instinct to buy an NBFC licence in 2018, to architect lending through a registered entity, to have the compliance folder ready before MeitY came knocking — that is institutional muscle memory built over a decade, and it is exactly the kind of judgment that competitors cannot hire or buy quickly.

There is a fourth power worth weighing, and it is the one that could prove most durable: switching costs, in their subtle behavioural form. A credit line you tap dozens of times a month for groceries and fuel is not a product you idly churn away from. It is wired into your daily routine, your repayment history is built up inside it, and your available limit grows as you demonstrate reliability — a limit you would forfeit and have to rebuild elsewhere. The customer who has spent two years cultivating a ₹50,000 RING limit through faithful repayment has a real, if unpriced, reason to stay. That is the quiet stickiness that high-frequency engagement buys, and it is precisely what the one-shot personal-loan model never had. Whether it is strong stickiness — strong enough to resist a Jio offering the same thing with a lower rate — is unproven. But it is a genuine improvement on a business where the customer used to vanish the moment the loan was repaid.

The honest assessment is that these powers are real but not impregnable. Counter-positioning erodes the day a deep-pocketed UPI giant decides credit-on-UPI is worth cannibalising for. The data flywheel is powerful but not unique — Bajaj Finance and the payment giants have data too, and arguably more of it. The switching costs are behavioural, not contractual, and behaviour can be bought back with a good enough offer. And a regulatory moat, by its nature, is a wall the regulator can move — the same pen that built the moat can lower it. That tension is the whole investment debate, so let's draw the two sides out fully.

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IX. The Bear vs. Bull Case

Here is where a sober investor has to hold two genuinely opposed pictures in mind at once, because both are well-supported by the same set of facts.

The bull case is a story about a structurally protected lender riding a once-in-a-generation expansion of India's borrowing class. Three hundred million Indians are climbing into the consuming middle class over the coming decade, most of them new-to-credit, most of them in exactly the tier-2 and tier-3 geography OnEMI has spent eleven years learning to underwrite. The company has the licence, the data flywheel, the merchant distribution, and — uniquely among its cohort — a regulator's stamp earned in the fire of 2023. The pivot from one-shot loans to RING's habitual credit-on-UPI converts a leaky acquisition funnel into a recurring relationship. And critically, the company is no longer a one-trick unsecured lender: the move into LAP and the swelling co-lending book give it a lower-risk, longer-duration ballast that didn't exist two years ago, with secured collateral providing a margin buffer if the unsecured cycle turns. In this telling, OnEMI is the rare 2021-era fintech that earned the right to compound — a regulated institution wearing an app, priced conservatively, run by founders with a third of the equity and a documented habit of buying above the IPO price.

The bear case is, fundamentally, two words from the prudent investor's lexicon: stroke-of-the-pen risk. Everything OnEMI built sits at the pleasure of the RBI. The same regulator whose rules built the moat can, with a single circular, raise risk weights on unsecured consumer lending — as it has done before, abruptly, across the sector — and compress the economics overnight. The MeitY episode itself is the cautionary tale here: regulatory action in India can arrive without warning, sweep in the compliant alongside the guilty, and freeze a lending business cold. A company whose core product is unsecured credit to thin-file borrowers is, by definition, levered to the credit cycle and to the whims of policy in a way a software business never is.

And the competitive threat is not hypothetical — it is the most dangerous force on the board. The credit-on-UPI insight that powers RING is brilliant, but it is not patentable. PhonePe processes a staggering share of India's UPI volume and has every incentive to bolt lending onto it. रिलायंस Reliance's Jio Financial Services arrived with a balance sheet, a telecom distribution network spanning hundreds of millions of subscribers, and a stated ambition to dominate exactly this space. When a player that already owns the daily-payments relationship and can fund loans at near-bank cost of capital decides to offer credit-on-UPI, OnEMI's counter-positioning advantage thins considerably. The giants don't have to be better; they have to be good enough and free.

Then there is the number the bull case tends to skip. OnEMI's FY25 operating revenue was about ₹1,337 crore — down roughly 20 percent from ₹1,674 crore in FY24 — with net profit of ₹160 crore, off about 18 percent.²⁰ A growth-story fintech does not usually report a revenue decline into its IPO. The most charitable reading, supported by the nine-month figures through December 2025 (revenue of ₹1,560 crore and ₹199 crore of profit, already exceeding the full prior year), is that FY25 reflected a deliberate de-risking — tightening underwriting and shortening the book through a stressed period in Indian unsecured lending, then re-accelerating into a healthier, longer-tenure, more secured mix.²⁰¹⁶ That is a defensible, even admirable, management choice. But it is also exactly what a lender heading into trouble would look like in its early stages, and an honest investor cannot yet fully distinguish the two from the outside. Prudence sat on the right side of that book — net NPAs at the NBFC have historically run remarkably clean — but a single bad cycle is how clean lending books stop being clean.

The "hidden potential" overlay, finally, cuts both ways. The tantalising optionality is that OnEMI evolves into a full-scale digital bank — converting toward a Small Finance Bank licence would give it access to cheap public deposits, the holy grail that would slash its cost of capital and neutralise the supplier-power risk in one move. That is the dream scenario, and the regulatory pedigree makes it more plausible for OnEMI than for almost any peer. But it is optionality, not plan — unconfirmed, years away if it happens at all, and not something to underwrite today. Which leaves the investor with a genuinely balanced ledger and a short list of things to actually watch.

A word on the accounting and the things a careful reader should keep an eye on, since a lender's reported profit is unusually a matter of judgment rather than fact. The single most important judgment any lender makes is how much to provision for loans that may go bad — the expected-credit-loss estimate. Set that provision conservatively and reported profit looks lower but the balance sheet is honest; set it aggressively and profit flatters today at the cost of nasty surprises tomorrow. Because OnEMI's FY25 already showed a revenue dip alongside a deliberate de-risking, an investor should watch whether provisioning stays conservative as the book re-accelerates — generous reserving during a slowdown is a good sign; thin reserving during a sprint is the classic prelude to trouble. The clean historical net-NPA figures and the ratings upgrade are reassuring on this front, but they describe the past. The other thing to track is the durability of the co-lending fee income: roughly half the AUM now sits in partnership structures, and fee income earned on managed portfolios is real but more dependent on partners renewing their appetite than spread income earned on the company's own book. Diversification of funding is a strength; dependence on a handful of partners staying enthusiastic is the matching risk.

If there are three numbers that tell you whether the bull or bear case is winning, they are these. First, AUM growth and mix at Si Creva — is the book compounding, and is the share of secured (LAP) and co-lent assets rising? That single metric captures growth, risk, and capital efficiency at once. Second, asset quality, the net non-performing-asset ratio — in unsecured lending, credit costs are the whole ballgame, and the first crack will show here. Third, the cost of funds, readable through the ratings trajectory — because for a lender that borrows to lend, the spread between what it pays for capital and what it earns on loans is, ultimately, the entire business. Watch those three, and the narrative writes itself.

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X. Epilogue: Compliance as a Moat

There is a temptation, telling a story like this, to make the founders into visionaries who saw it all coming. The more honest and more useful version is quieter. Ranvir Singh and Krishnan Vishwanathan did not predict the MeitY ban or the precise shape of the RBI's 2022 directions. What they did was make a single structural choice — to build inside the regulatory perimeter when everyone fashionable was building outside it — and then let that choice compound through every crisis the next decade threw at them.

That is the lesson that outlives the ticker. In most industries, compliance is a cost centre, a drag, the department that says no. In lending — where the product is risk and the licence to operate is granted by the state — compliance is a moat. It is the wall that keeps new entrants out, the folder that proves you're legitimate when the government comes knocking, the rating that lowers your cost of capital, the reason a near-death experience becomes a competitive advantage. OnEMI didn't survive the great fintech cull of 2023–2025 despite being over-regulated. It survived because it was.

It is worth dwelling, too, on what the founders' behaviour reveals about the kind of company they intend to run as a public entity. The decision to price the IPO conservatively, to buy shares above that price, to channel the bulk of the proceeds into the regulated balance sheet rather than a growth-marketing blitz, and to retain a third of the equity — these are not the moves of operators looking to maximise a day-one exit. They are the moves of people who expect to still be here in ten years and want the share register populated by investors who feel the same way. In a market that spent half a decade rewarding the opposite instincts, that restraint is either a quaint relic or a genuine edge. The OnEMI thesis is, in the end, a bet on which of those it turns out to be.

The Sachin Tendulkar endorsement, viewed through this lens, is more than celebrity marketing, even if it left the great batsman temporarily underwater on his shares. For a mass-market lender chasing the trust of tens of millions of first-time borrowers in small-town India, the face of the most trusted man in the country is a statement that credit from Kissht is safe — that this is an institution, not a loan-shark app. In a category where the entire war is over trust, borrowing Tendulkar's is a rational, if expensive, shortcut.

What remains genuinely uncertain is everything that matters most: whether the credit cycle holds, whether the UPI giants decide to compete in earnest, whether the regulator's pen stays kind, and whether a company that just reported a revenue dip can convert its de-risking into durable, compounding growth. Those are open questions, and nothing in this story resolves them. What this story does establish is the nature of the thing the investor is buying. OnEMI Technology Solutions is not a payments app that dabbles in credit, and it is not a marketing brand renting someone else's balance sheet. It is a licensed, rated, regulated lending institution that learned, the hard way, that in Indian finance the boring path is the only one that ends at a listing bell rather than a shutdown notice. They didn't just build an app. They built a regulated institution — and then, on a Friday morning in May 2026, they took it public.