Global Fintech Fest: Kissht’s Next Phase of Growth Means Becoming a Broader Financial-Services Company, Not Just a Lender

After serving more than 12 million customers, the digital lender Kissht sees the next phase of growth in leveraging artificial intelligence to sharpen decision making, and understanding the customers better while widening the customer base.

The company also looks at expanding the range of their financial products, as per the Founder and Chief Executive Officer (Founder & CEO) of the company, Ranvir Singh. He spoke to The Economic Times on the sidelines of the ongoing Global Fintech Fest (GFF) in Mumbai.

“We have served more than 12 million customers. We do not see this as a one loan relationship,” Singh said, speaking about the company’s objective of building a long-term relationship with its customers, “We see this as something where we are helping them solve a problem they are in, which can be solved through credit,”


Singh emphasised that the goal for the company was to turn this scale into a broader financial-services business, in sync with the core theme of this year’s GFF: “Potential to Impact. Agentic AI | Tokenisation | Quantum. Trusted, Connected, Global Systems for Inclusive Finance”.

“There are other products that we also offer, insurance for instance. And we have also started offering mutual funds to our customers. The objective being that we are able to take care of a larger set of needs while loan being the core or central point of what we have to offer,” he said.

The company has also started scaling up Loan Against Property (LAP), a “significant opportunity” to serve the wide customer base, even as they are using artificial intelligence for a more granular understanding of the customers.

AI, no longer just a buzzword
For Kissht, artificial intelligence has moved from boardroom discussions to profit and loss. It is a major pillar of their growth strategy, and they are banking on the technology for measurable business outcomes.

The company has identified around 42 AI initiatives in areas it expects to witness tangible impact on the profit and loss statements. The most significant among these, as per Singh, is the AI’s application in underwriting achieving a spike of around 20-30% in approval ratios, compared to the earlier levels.

“It is not so much for adoption. The issue here is whether that adoption is translating into some of the specific business metrics,” Singh said, adding that the company’s use of AI in underwriting has given it an advantage to get a clearer picture of type-2 risk in loan business, “Which is basically saying that a customer is good, yet you are not able to identify it because the evidence is not clear,”

This AI implementation, for Kissht, is moving beyond just credit decisions and into customer service, collections, software development, and more. For the company AI is becoming less of an experimentation exercise, and more of an operating necessity.

“At this stage, as much as it is a cliche, if you are not in but to implement AI you run the risk of becoming completely stale, or not competitive as you move ahead,” Singh told The Economic Times.

This technology push at the company comes at a time when it is aggressively pursuing growth. But with growth comes risk.

Risk and Growth, the equation

Kissht is targeting a growth of around 40%, moving forward, with the belief that there will be no shortcuts on risk management. Instead, the company looks at risk differentiation as the central competitive advantage.

Singh argues that the proposition for Kissht is different, with a wealth of customer data accumulated over the years, experience across credit cycles, and sophisticated AI-backed models to identify good borrowers promptly and more accurately.

“It boils down to our ability to discriminate on risk,” Singh said, “Our team as individuals are fanatical about ensuring that we get risk under control, because we understand that it is the core thing,”

He asserted that simple mechanisms, increasing the loan tenure for instance, may deliver growth in the short term, but does not provide a competitive advantage that is durable.

As the company expands into newer products with a diverse risk characteristic, Singh acknowledged that they have to be more prudent than ever in risk management and differentiation.

Speaking of diversifying the product range, the addition of Loan Against Property (LAP) has been an immense advantage for Kissht, which they did not have earlier.

Why is LAP an advantage, an opportunity?
For Kissht, there has been a four-fold increase in LAP business year-on-year, with a share of 7.7% in total business turnover as of June 2025. Singh says the growth has been healthy, and the company remains really excited about what it has built.

“Why is it important?” Singh asked the question as well, and said that diversification of the product range was not the only reason. The answer to this question lies in the existing customer base of the company, who have taken between ₹1,800 crore and ₹2,000 crore of LAP every month.

Kissht had not been able to cater to this demand earlier, given that they did not have the product. Now their existing customers bring about 40% of the total LAP business for them, which is an advantage against a lender who has to acquire every LAP customer from scratch.

“We do not have to put in effort and cost to acquire them,” Singh, who wants the company to build a technology-led secure lending model, said, “The logic is straightforward: combine an existing customer base with data and AI to improve risk assessment and create a differential lending proposition,”

Kissht has been growing steadily, and the company is a listed one now.

But what did the IPO change?
While Singh maintains that the daily working of the company has remained largely unchanged after getting listed, he adds in the same breath that getting listed brings about another level of responsibility and accountability.

“When the company is listed, we carry a different level of responsibility,” Singh said, “We are not here to create an organisation for the next few years, we are looking at the larger time horizon instead,”

For that to happen, he said, he keeps a close watch on what he called “daily profitability”.

His ambition, as shared with The Economic Times, is not becoming India’s largest lender, instead he has his eyes on becoming a financial-services provider that can leverage the customer base it has and broaden its product range.

“What you saw with LAP is just the beginning,” Singh said, while acknowledging that vigilance about financial performance was a must moving forward, which includes maintaining an ROI of 20%, while expanding the product suite.

Essentially, the company is looking at the next chapter to monetise the scale it has already built, through deeper customer relationships, sharper risk assessment, secured lending, and increasingly embedded AI.