QuickLend: safer B2C lending in India

This interview was conducted and transcribed by Aakash Athawasya, marking his inaugural RO article.

Biography

Raghuram Trikutam is the co-founder of QuickLend, an Indian lending startup.

QuickLend provides loans using financial assets as collateral, starting with mutual funds. In Q1 2025, QuickLend raised a pre-seed round of INR 6.75 crore (~$800k) to scale up operations.

Raghuram and his co-founders previously built payments teams at major tech companies.

Raghuram was with the Google Pay team and worked with India’s United Payments Interface (UPI). Co-founder Arun Jadhav was at UberPay in Amsterdam, and co-founder Abhishek Uppala was the founding engineer for Stripe India.

How did the co-founders’ background help in starting QuickLend?

The three of us have been in the fintech space for more than a decade. We’ve each built companies like Google Pay, UberPay, and Stripe in India. This gave us a strong Indian fintech network, which allowed us to approach and speak to various people to figure out a market gap. 

This “founder market fit” (FMF) preceded the idea of QuickLend.

Why did you pick loans against mutual funds (LAMF) as the place to start?

We didn’t start off with LAMF specifically. The grander vision was to build a product in the secured lending space. Here, “secured” refers to an asset that backs the loan amount (ie: a collateral). The more liquid the asset the better, and if it appreciates, great! But “secured” goes beyond mutual funds to include stocks, insurance, fixed deposits and even gold (despite its operational challenges).

We chose the secured space because of several factors.

Over the past few years, and especially after Covid-19, zero interest rate policies (ZIRP) created an abundance of easy, cheap money. This led to lending fintechs raising tons of it. To earn revenue, they lent it out without collateral (unsecured) at high interest rates, leading to irresponsible volumes and rising non-performing assets (or NPAs). 

In response to this, India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), cracked down against these unsecured loans. This forced a lot of fintechs to pivot to secured lending.

This was a good decision. For an economy to grow, credit is important, but it needs to be balanced. RBI’s intervention forced lending to be taken seriously and securely. With that precedent, we started QuickLend, offering loans against mutual funds.

This segment’s total addressable market (TAM) has surged. Mutual funds assets held by Indian retail investors grew from INR28.10 lakh crore ($328B) in September 2023 to INR42.10 lakh crore ($491B) in 2024.

Add to that the blistering growth in stock market participation. Between 2023 and 2024 alone, the number of retail brokerage accounts jumped by a third. The National Stock Exchange said it now has around 110M unique investors. 

That growth in India’s investor base (and therefore, growth in potential lenders with collateral to pledge) gave us the confidence that the market is large and trending in the right direction. 

Source

How did the MVP look before you rolled it out to the public?

In the fintech space, you can’t build a scrappy MVP and iterate. Even the v1 needs to meet a certain standard because regulatory compliance is non-negotiable. Our MVP included all the necessary features from a regulatory standpoint and across the lifecycle of a loan grantee – fetching mutual fund holdings, enabling pledging, completing KYC, getting loan agreements signed digitally with Aadhaar (India’s unique identification number)... These are table stakes even to launch a product like this.

We’ve been live since February 2025, and there’s still a lot left to build. But functionally, we’re complete.

Describe QuickLend’s product.

QuickLend is a lending enabler, not a loan provider. This means we don’t lend ourselves. We simply ensure that customers with enough collateral are able to get a loan through us.

To go to market, we needed two things: capital deployers (supply), and capital seekers (demand).

On the supply side of capital, we work on three kinds of models.

The first is a lending service provider (LSP) model where we integrate our platform with an NBFC’s APIs, originate loans for them, and earn revenue through trail commissions (we share cuts of loan repayments) on the loans sourced through us. Think of us as an acquisition source for the NBFC.

The second is a technology service provider (TSP) model, where we provide our loan origination infrastructure to a fintech or NBFC. They decide the lending terms with the end customer, and we get a fixed fee per transaction. Think of us as a typical SaaS provider, specifically for an NBFC’s lending product.

The third is a full-stack infrastructure provider model, where we offer a complete infrastructure layer for the NBFC to operate digital lending (from finding the lending customer, providing the technology to carry out the process of pledging MF, sending money, collecting interest payments, unpledging shares…)

Right now, most of our partnerships are in the LSP model, but we’re expanding into the two other formats.

And on the demand, customer acquisition side?

We operate through a B2C and a B2B2C model.

B2C is where direct loan applicants come to us, connect their mutual fund holdings, pledge them, and avail the loan against them. We’re not focused on it right now, but it exists.

With B2B2C, we work with third-party institutions like fintech platforms and mutual fund distributors (MFDs) who want to offer lending to their existing customers. 

We have about 4-5 of these institutions at the integration stage, and they will go live this quarter. Conversation with these partners revolve around customer redirection, availing their services to our lending offerings. For instance, we work with Ashika Group, a brokerage, where their customers can pledge their mutual funds for a loan with us directly.

We also work with independent chartered accountants (CAs) and smaller MFDs (around 125 of them). Once again, we partner with them to offer lending as an additional service to their own customers.

For the B2B2C model, we share our revenue from the loan with the partner we plug our offering into. That model also renders potentially zero customer acquisition cost (CAC), since we rely on partners to get customers. They generate the leads, and we handle everything from fetching MF data to pre-loan and post-loan servicing. 

That means we have minimal CAC ourselves, as we’re not spending money to acquire users directly. There is minimal cost for distribution if we co-brand or co-market with partners, but it’s marginal and focused more on customer reengagement than direct new customer acquisition. 

What kind of loans does QuickLend offer?

QuickLend offers “interest-only loans,” not equated monthly installment (EMI) loans. The borrower pays only the interest, rather than the principal plus the interest, every month. That way, our customer has liquidity in their hands to do other things. Some use the loan amount to invest in the market, although we don’t encourage it.

Can’t mutual funds companies build a lending product and replace QuickLend?

That’s a possibility but the math doesn’t work out.

Let’s say such a company goes directly to an NBFC with 50,000 customers. The NBFC might offer them a take rate of ~40 basis points, based on their scale. 

But QuickLend is partnering with 30 such companies (through B2B2C partners) and collectively taking a larger user base (~0.5M) to the same NBFC. We can thus negotiate a better rate, say 65 basis points.

It becomes a question of scale and efficiency. We’re offering an embedded secured lending infrastructure, and we aggregate demand to unlock better unit economics for everyone involved. Even though it might seem like they can replace us, lending is a specialized play.

Many mutual fund or wealth management platforms don’t have lending expertise or operational readiness. That’s why they prefer to work with us and let us manage the complexity.

Who is the ideal borrower for QuickLend, and what are the most common use cases for these loans?

We don’t have a definite borrower persona. But we have an ideal ticket size based on the loan amount, around INR 250,000 (~$3,000), which is significantly higher than the ticket size for unsecured loans, which is in the range of INR 50,000 to 75,000 ($550 to $875). 

However, we also support high-ticket loans; the largest sum we serviced was a loan of INR 20 million ($230,000). We don’t support loans below INR 25,000 ($300). This naturally filters the borrower base. Our pledged AUM right now stands at INR 72 million ($850,000).

Most of our borrowers have been investing INR 5,000 to 10,000 ($58 to $120) a month in the markets through mutual funds for a couple of years. They’re usually earning at least INR 600,000 ($7,000) per annum, and they want to preserve their long, drawn-out investments while accessing cheaper capital.

In terms of our customers’ use cases, we’ve seen a wide variety. One borrower took a loan to make a down payment on a plot of land, something traditional home loans don’t cover. Someone else used the loan to fund his daughter’s wedding. There’s no single use case.

On the business side, we’ve seen that working capital financing is a recurring reason. Our key value proposition (as opposed to SME loans from banks and NBFCs) is speed and cost. 

SME loans take one to two weeks and come with interest rates between 12% to 25%. If you have mutual funds, we can disburse the loan within an hour, at 10.5%. It’s fully digital, and the process is simple. It’s important to note that in this case, the business owner takes a loan against their personal mutual fund assets, and uses the loan as operating expenditure (OPEX) for their business. It’s not a popular mechanism yet.

What was a key operational challenge you faced, and how did you get through it?

My co-founders and I come from the same background: product and engineering. This allowed us to build a solid, low-defect product early, which made demos to fintechs and NBFCs easier.

The bigger challenge was the GTM side because none of us came from a sales and marketing background. We had to learn how to sell and position ourselves. To address this quickly, we made some hires. I have to admit we underestimated how long the sales cycle to onboard a partner and acquire a user was. We thought it would take a few days to close a deal, but it actually takes 45 to 60 days after the first meeting to close and go live. That’s something we learnt by doing.

Over time, we’ve built a clearer sales pipeline, figured out priorities and ownership structures. I focus on large clients, while the core sales team handles independent CAs and MFDs. The challenge was to get more structure as we scale.

Have you explored international markets for QuickLend’s model?

Once we see how the product plays out in India, we want to look at how it fares in the US market. We have a few exploratory calls set up through some of our US-based angel investors. 

The US market is different from India’s, but there is interest, particularly from an infrastructure perspective (the TSP model), not necessarily the LSP model. The infra-led model could work in the US (giving brokers the infra to disburse MFs-backed loans) and that’s something we’re considering. 

First, we’ll stabilize the model in India, then explore how to expand internationally.

What are future product plans?

QuickLend’s vision is grander than just mutual funds. In Q3 this year, we’re planning to launch loans against stocks. Depending on how that and our existing verticals perform, we may expand into other secured lending products, like loans against insurance and property.

We’ve also considered gold, but we’re holding off because it’s a saturated market, and it involves a lot of physical handling, which makes operations more complex. We prefer to stick to assets that are digital because they can be pledged and liquidated online.

We’re focused on secured lending products backed by liquid assets. Property is an exception to that, and if we explore and execute it, it would be a long-term bet rather than a near-term product.

What made you go down the VC route instead of bootstrapping?

Building a fintech, especially in the lending space, requires resources. The opportunity in this space is large, and while we could build something as a bootstrapped team of three cofounders, it would take significantly longer. Raising a small round gave us the flexibility to act quickly and make the most of the market momentum.

Having capital in the bank helps us hire faster, crack distribution, and speed up product development.

We're already seeing steady revenue, both fixed payouts from our software and variable payouts from loans. Our idea isn’t to raise endlessly. Instead, we want to get enough capital to push through the early stages and scale with intent.

When you spoke with investors, was there any particular pushback that they had with the model?

To be honest, we didn’t get much pushback from investors.

If anything, they were bullish on this model and the approach to secured lending because Indian regulators want more secured loans, and Indian fintechs are hesitant in offering this because it cannibalizes their own margins (from unsecured lending).

Secured lending isn’t new, it’s just that secured lending digitally is evolving. That’s where the real innovation and growth are, and most investors we spoke with recognized that.

Are there any strategic mistakes you’ve made since you’ve been live?

Early on, we waited too long for one particular NBFC to go live. We were optimistic about that partnership and didn’t onboard others in the meantime. That delay set us back by almost four months. Eventually, we decided to move ahead and launched with Bajaj instead.

Another learning was around positioning the product. We tried to define ourselves too rigidly as a B2C and B2B company, thinking about how VCs wanted to understand us. But we realized, we were too early to be defined. We’re a lending company, our focus should be on enabling access to credit, regardless of how the borrower comes, either through a partner or directly. The goal is that the investment loan process should be done efficiently.

That mindset shift has made us more flexible and practical about where to invest time and resources. We're still experimenting, but we now have a clearer sense of what works.

Is there a particular channel (B2B2C or B2C) that you're more bullish on?

We’re more bullish on B2B2C than B2C.

Secured loans are, by nature, lower-margin products compared to unsecured loans. If you're building a B2C business on that, your CAC needs to be extremely low to justify the revenue per user. That’s tough in India, unless you’re exceptionally efficient with growth.

Also, lending is a need-based product, people come to you when they require credit. It’s not something you can aggressively push with marketing the way you might with consumer app-based financial services. So the economics don’t really support a B2C approach at scale, at least not yet. That said, we’re still exploring it.

But at this stage, B2B2C is clearly the more practical and scalable route.

As this is a “need-based product,” how does it affect your customer outreach strategy?

Our outreach strategy focuses on customer education. In the current unsecured lending space, this is largely missing; most fintechs aren’t upfront with users. Our goal is simple: help customers understand when and why a loan might be right for them.

In our communication, we use the word “affordable” rather than “cheap.” We want users to see that this is a more affordable option compared to a personal loan, especially when used as an emergency credit line. We also explain that emergencies are unpredictable, and redeeming mutual funds can take up to three working days. Having access to instant liquidity through a pledged loan can make all the difference.

Do you see the Indian middle class's indebtedness problem as a concern going forward?

Yes, Indians have rising debt levels, but their approach to credit is more price-conscious. The moment they see an attractive borrowing interest rate (like 10.49% that we offer), it becomes attractive.

Many of the loans that middle-class Indians take come at higher rates: used car loans often range from 12% to 20%, two-wheeler loans can go up to 16%, and education loans vary widely depending on the institution. Our rates are more competitive. 

One example is a customer who works at HDFC Bank (the largest private bank in India). Instead of taking an education loan through the bank, they borrowed from us. Rather than liquidate mutual funds every six months, he pledged them, took an interest-only loan, and used that liquidity to pay fees while keeping his investments intact. This is a unique use case that shows how this kind of product fits well with evolving middle-class financial needs.

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