I used to think the hard part of lending was the money. It is not. The money is the easy part. The hard part is the silence. You make a decision today. You approve a borrower, set a ticket size, and agree on a tenure. You do this with the best information you have, and…
Nobody sends an email to say the book is loosening. There is no formal meeting, no board resolution, no policy change. The loosening happens in the white space between decisions like one approved exception, one negotiated flexibility, and one adjacent segment noted as underserved. Each accommodation is defensible. Each has a commercial rationale. And each…
Every February, the same ritual plays out. The Finance Minister rises. The markets hold their breath. Within minutes, the conversation narrows to one question: did the income tax slabs change? If yes, by how much? If no, mild disappointment, and the document is shelved for another year. I find this ritual fascinating and its narrowness…
I have sat through a considerable number of panel discussions, business dinners, and industry gatherings over the years. The conversation about wealth, how it is built, how it is protected, how it is lost, comes up reliably. What strikes me, every time, is how little of what is actually true gets said out loud. There…
Ask yourself a simple question: What is money? It seems almost embarrassingly straightforward — the kind of question a child asks, and an adult deflects with a rehearsed answer about purchasing power and legal tender. But sit with it long enough, resist the textbook scaffolding, and the question begins to unspool into something considerably more…
In January 2024, Unified Payment Interface (UPI) transactions hit a new high of Rs 18.41 trillion, a slight increase of 1% from December’s Rs 18.23 trillion. The number of transactions also grew by 1.5%, reaching 12.20 billion from 12.02 billion in October. In November, the total transaction value was Rs 17.4 trillion with 11.4 billion…