In this episode of India FinTech Diaries, we explore a quietly emerging shift in India’s investment landscape: the rise of fixed income as a retail asset class.

While equities and mutual funds have become mainstream, fixed income—despite offering predictable returns and portfolio stability—has remained largely inaccessible to individual investors.

To unpack this, we speak with Vineet Agarwal, Co-founder of Jiraaf, a platform focused on democratizing access to fixed income investments.

The core idea is simple but powerful: enable retail investors to do what institutions and family offices have been doing for decades—invest meaningfully in fixed income products.

Contact Jiraaf

Website: https://www.jiraaf.com/

X: https://x.com/Jiraaf_Official

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/jiraafofficial/

In this episode of India FinTech Diaries, we dive into one of the most under-discussed—but critical—layers of the lending stack: debt collections.

As digital lending in India scales rapidly, especially in unsecured credit, the stress is increasingly showing up not in underwriting—but in collections. Traditional systems, built for a low-volume, high-touch world, are now struggling to keep up with instant disbursals and millions of borrowers.

To unpack this shift, we speak with Ananth Shroff, Co-founder & CEO of DPDzero, who is reimagining collections as a full-stack, AI-driven infrastructure problem rather than an operational afterthought.

Key Themes from the Episode

⚡ Lending Has Evolved. Collections Haven’t Loans are now disbursed in seconds—but collections infra is still built for a physical, slow, agency-led world. This mismatch is becoming a bottleneck for growth.

🧩 Collections is Still Treated as an Afterthought Despite being core to unit economics, collections is often the “stepchild” of lending—underinvested, fragmented, and operationally inefficient.

📉 Unsecured Lending = Rising Stress Signals As digital lending scales, delinquencies are increasingly concentrated in unsecured portfolios—making collections infra mission-critical.

🤖 AI + Orchestration > Channels in Silos SMS, WhatsApp, calls, field visits—all exist today, but operate independently. The real unlock is intelligent orchestration across channels, not just adding more touchpoints.

🧠 Persona-Based Collections is the Breakthrough Not all defaulters are the same. From supportive to intentional, identifying borrower intent using AI enables better recovery and better borrower experience.

⚖️ Compliance + Empathy is the New Standard With RBI tightening norms and social media amplifying borrower voices, collections must balance recovery with dignity and transparency.

🔮 The Future: Full-Stack, Intelligence-Driven Collections The next generation of collections platforms will combine AI, operations, compliance, and legal workflows into a single integrated stack.

Tune in to understand how to rebuild collections for the digital lending era !!

Contact DPDzero

• Website: https://dpdzero.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dpdzero/
• X: https://x.com/dpdzero

In this episode of India FinTech Diaries, we unpack one of the most urgent challenges facing digital finance today: fraud at scale. With cybercrime cases in India crossing 36 lakh in 2024 and losses exceeding ₹22,000 crore, fraud is no longer an edge case—it’s a systemic risk.

To decode how fraud has evolved and what institutions must do next, we speak with Venkat Srinivasan, Chief Analytics and Risk Officer at Bureau.

Venkat explains why modern fraud is no longer about fake documents or isolated bad actors. Instead, it’s coordinated, networked, and industrialized—powered by mule accounts, device spoofing, identity rotation, and real-time information sharing.

Key Highlights:

🕸️ Fraud has become organizedWhat once looked like individual theft now resembles syndicates operating across banks, fintechs, and marketplaces simultaneously.

🧩Siloed risk systems are breaking downKYC, fraud monitoring, AML, and device intelligence working in isolation miss the bigger picture. Unified risk decisioning is now essential.

📱 Devices are the new identity layerFrom fingerprinting to behavioral biometrics, the device has become a powerful signal—often more reliable than static identity documents.

🧠 Graph-based models are the futureBureau’s use of graph data structures helps uncover hidden networks and patterns that linear rules and traditional models simply cannot detect.

⚖️ Compliance is a guardrail, not a blockerVenkat makes a strong case for internalizing regulation as a design constraint that enables sustainable innovation, rather than treating it as a checkbox.

This episode is a must-listen for fintech founders, risk leaders, product teams, and policymakers grappling with the trade-offs between growth, friction, privacy, and trust.

• Website: https://bureau.id/