A powerful tool for democratising credit access

In recent years, credit bureaus, alternative data, and technology-based underwriting capabilities have matured and evolved, providing new opportunities to the financial services sector. According to a 2022 CIBIL study, over 50 per cent of the country’s credit-eligible adults do not have access to credit, and 160 million consumers are underserved. Over 240 million have credit scores and credit histories. However, the credit-card base is about 82 million; and unique cards are under 40 million. In credit-card usage and acceptance, we lag significantly behind other comparable economies such as China (800 million) and Brazil (408 m