The User Nobody Asks: What Borrowers Actually Experience

A few months ago, someone messaged Finanjo through Reddit. Not a customer, not someone we had ever spoken to. He had seen a comment we left on a thread about credit card debt and wrote to us directly, in the middle of the night, in the way people write when they have been carrying something alone for a while.

He had three loans running. A personal loan from a bank, taken two years ago for a medical expense in the family. A BNPL balance he had stopped tracking. And a third loan, taken four months earlier, to cover the EMI on the first two after a rough month at work. He was not behind on anything, technically. Every payment was going through. But he did the math for us in his message, almost apologetically, like he was confessing something. After all three EMIs, he had about six thousand rupees left for the rest of the month, groceries, transport, everything.

He did not ask us for a loan. He asked us a much smaller question. He asked whether what he was doing was normal, or whether he had done something wrong.

That question is the entire subject of this article.

The two previous pieces, and what they left out

The first article in this series looked at the scale of the problem, RBI licensed NBFCs charging up to 600 percent annualised interest, legally. The second looked at how India’s lending regulation got here, reactive fixes that solved yesterday’s crisis while leaving tomorrow’s wide open.

Both of those articles are true, and both of them are, in a sense, safely abstract. Percentages. Regulatory timelines. Numbers that are easy to be outraged by and easy to look away from once the scrolling continues.

This article is about the part that is harder to look away from. Not the system. The person inside it.

What the data says, and what it hides

Before the story, the numbers, because they set the scale of what we are talking about.

Sixty percent of new personal loan borrowers in India today already carry three or more live loans. The RBI’s ombudsman received over 13,000 complaints related to digital lending in a twenty month window. Fewer than one in three borrowers can correctly state the actual annualised cost of the loan they are currently repaying.

Numbers like this are usually presented as a systemic failure, and they are. But sit with them for a second longer and they describe something more specific, millions of individual moments, each one similar to a message sent late at night, where a person quietly wonders if the thing they are experiencing is normal.

It almost always is normal. That is what almost nobody tells them.

The shame that keeps the system running

Debt in India carries a specific kind of silence that is different from most other financial struggles. People will discuss a bad investment openly. They will complain about a landlord, a boss, an expensive wedding. Debt is different. Debt is treated as evidence of a personal failure, something you manage alone and mention to almost no one, sometimes not even a spouse.

This silence is not incidental to how predatory lending survives. It is structural to it. A borrower who feels ashamed does not compare notes with anyone. They do not ask a friend whether 1 percent a day sounds high. They do not Google the annualised rate before agreeing to a small daily fee. They take the loan quietly, and if it goes badly, they carry that quietly too.

Contrast this with something as mundane as a mobile phone plan. People openly ask friends and colleagues which network has better rates, which plan makes sense, whether a deal is actually good. There is no shame in comparing a two hundred rupee decision out loud. There is enormous shame in comparing a thirty thousand rupee one.

This asymmetry, high shame around high stakes decisions, low shame around low stakes ones, is precisely backwards from where scrutiny is actually needed. And it is precisely the gap that a system built around extraction, rather than advice, depends on.

What a borrower’s actual journey looks like

Strip away the marketing language every lending app uses, instant approval, hassle free, in your account in minutes, and look at what a borrower is actually doing, step by step, when they need money quickly.

They have a real, often urgent need. A medical bill. A vehicle repair that is blocking their income, since for a large number of India’s borrowers, income depends on being mobile. A rent payment due before a delayed salary arrives. Rarely a want. Almost always a need.

They search, and the results that surface first are not the best options. They are the ones with the largest ad budgets, which correlates poorly, sometimes inversely, with being the fairest option. A well capitalised predatory lender will always outbid a well priced, responsible one for the top search result.

They apply, often to two or three apps simultaneously, because approval is uncertain and time matters. Each application is a hard enquiry on their credit report, quietly making their profile look worse before they have taken a single rupee.

They get approved somewhere, usually the app with the loosest underwriting, since loose underwriting and predatory pricing tend to travel together. Loose underwriting is not generosity. It is a business model that prices for the borrowers who cannot repay by extracting more from the ones who can.

They accept the terms, almost never reading the full sanction letter closely, because they are three steps deep into an urgent problem and the interface makes acceptance one tap away.

They repay, or they don’t, and if they don’t, a new loan appears to offer, often from the very same NBFC under a different name, to cover the first.

At no point in that entire sequence does anyone ask the borrower the one question that actually matters. Is this loan, on these terms, right for you, specifically, right now. Not can we approve you. Not how fast can we disburse. Whether this is genuinely good for you.

Nobody asks it because nobody in that chain is paid to ask it.

What borrowers actually say they want

Over the last several months, in the process of building Finanjo’s lending advisory, and in conversations that started, like the Reddit message above, from people who found us before we had built anything to sell them, a consistent pattern shows up in what people actually ask for.

They rarely ask for a lower interest rate as their first request. Most assume the rate they were quoted is simply what rates are. What they ask for first is almost always a version of, can you just tell me if this is okay.

They want to know if their situation is unusual. It almost never is, and hearing that seems to matter more to people than any specific piece of financial advice.

They want someone to check the math for them, not do it for them. Several borrowers we have spoken to are entirely capable of reading a loan document. What they lack is not capability. It is the presence of someone, anyone, checking alongside them, because financial decisions made entirely alone, under stress, are worse than the same decisions made with even one other informed person in the room.

They want to be told, plainly, if they are about to make a bad decision, even if that means hearing no. Several people have told us, almost with surprise, that no lending app or agent has ever told them not to take a loan.

That last point is worth sitting with. In an entire industry built around approving people for credit, the single most requested, and least available, response is simply, don’t take this one.

Why this matters more than the interest rate headline

It would be easy to read the first article in this series and conclude the fix is a rate cap. Cap NBFC interest rates, problem solved. Regulation may eventually move in that direction, and it might help.

But a rate cap does not fix a borrower applying to three apps and damaging their credit score before they’ve taken a rupee. It does not fix someone accepting terms they never read because the interface made acceptance frictionless. It does not fix the shame that keeps people from asking a simple, obvious question before they sign.

The deeper problem is not that credit is expensive. The deeper problem is that credit decisions in India are almost always made alone, under time pressure, without anyone in the room whose only job is the borrower’s outcome.

That is not a pricing problem. That is an advice problem. And advice is not something regulation can mandate into existence. It has to be built.

What we told the person who messaged us

We did not have a product to offer him that night. What we told him was closer to what he actually asked for than any product could have been. That his situation was common, not shameful. That the second and third loans he had taken to cover the first were the actual danger, not the original one, and that the priority now was to stop that specific pattern, not to feel bad about how he got here. That there were consolidation options that could plausibly bring his EMI burden down, and that it was worth exploring them before taking on anything new.

He wrote back a few days later. Not to thank us extravagantly, just a short message. He said it was the first time anyone in this entire process had asked him how he was doing, rather than how much he could pay.

That sentence is, in many ways, the entire thesis of this series in a single line. The system asks borrowers how much they can pay. Almost nobody asks how they are doing.

What comes next

The next article in this series turns to the other side of this equation, fintech itself, and asks an uncomfortable question. An entire generation of Indian fintech companies promised to make finance more human, more transparent, more fair than the legacy system it was replacing. Where, specifically, did that promise break down, and why did digital lending, of all categories, end up repeating so many of the same patterns it was supposed to fix.

Previous in the series: How We Got Here – A Short History of Digital Lending in India
Next in the series: The Fintech Failure — Why “Digital” Didn’t Mean “Better”