India has spent the last decade building one of the world’s most sophisticated digital public infrastructures for finance. The next decade will not be defined by digitising lending but will be defined by making lending intelligent. Artificial intelligence has the potential to fundamentally reshape who gets credit, how risk is assessed, and how quickly financial opportunity reaches millions of Indians. This is more than automation. AI is changing the economics of lending by reducing the cost of evaluating borrowers, enabling lenders to responsibly serve customer segments that were previously difficult to assess. India’s credit story is entering a new phase. But the more interesting shift lies in understanding who is finally getting a slice of it. Large numbers of creditworthy Indians still sit outside the formal credit system because traditional scorecards simply don’t have enough data to assess them. This is the gap that AI-powered lending is built to close. Traditional underwriting was built for salaried borrowers in the formal economy, relying on documents such as payslips, bank statements, and credit bureau scores. It works well for people who already have a credit history but fails, almost by design, for everyone else—including self-employed individuals, gig workers, and first-generation entrepreneurs. AI-powered underwriting takes a different approach. It draws on alternative data such as digital payment transactions, GST filings, bank statements, and utility payments, converting everyday digital footprints into dynamic risk profiles. The infrastructure to support this shift is now in place, and it is scaling fast. The Reserve Bank of India's Account Aggregator framework enables consent-based, secure sharing of financial data across institutions, reducing documentation requirements and loan turnaround times. As of December 2025, the ecosystem had enabled over 2.6 billion financial accounts for data sharing, with more than 252 million user-linked accounts, reflecting rapid adoption while still leaving significant room for further penetration. The Unified Lending Interface is doing the same for loan origination: 64 lenders, including 41 banks and 23 NBFCs, were live on it by December 2025, up from just 36 a year earlier, drawing on more than 136 data services—from digitised land records to satellite imagery—across a dozen loan journeys. Combined with near-universal digital identity and payments infrastructure, AI models can now build a real-time picture of a borrower’s financial behaviour. The results are already visible in underwriting economics. Loan decisions that once took days are increasingly being made in minutes. That shift is reflected in real lives: a first-generation woman entrepreneur can take another step towards building her business, while a gig worker can finally finance a second-hand scooter to expand his earning potential. India’s credit expansion is no longer just existing borrowers taking bigger loans—it is pulling entirel
