2001Gupta joins ICICI Bank, in the grants department. Nobody yet believed finance for the poor could be run commercially. The microfinance team that grew out of it did over ₹5,000 crore of volume in five years, which settled the question of scale in his mind.
2007Chennai, and a branch network worth building. He left because microfinance was inflexible and credit only, when customers also needed savings and insurance, and set up IFMR Trust, now branded Dvara and Northern Arc. He ran it for the next ten years. Physical branches were the right answer to the requirements of 2007.
2017Kaleidofin, because the phone is now the branch. Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and cheap smartphones had changed what distribution meant, so he and Sucharita Mukherjee left to build customised financial products rather than another branch estate.
2017+ki score is trained on the bad years. Seven to ten years of bureau trade lines and partner loan data covering over 1.5 crore customers, modelled against default events: who defaulted when demonetisation hit, who paid first, who came back three or four months later once the cash returned, and which farmer kept paying through a flood. The activists on the team argued age, gender, caste, religion and pincode out of the model.
2020-21The book holds through both waves. Around ₹3,000 crore was underwritten on the score at the height of COVID, and collections on it stayed above 99% through the disruptions, including the second wave.
Today₹6,500 crore, and a licence application pending. Partners have made about 1.2 million loans on ki score reports and 16 lakh customers have been underwritten, across 230 districts and 14 states, 97% of them women. An application for a non-bank finance licence sits with the RBI, and the new equity goes into that credit business plus a zero-cost co-branded account built with a licensed bank.
