India’s digital lending ecosystem is undergoing rapid transformation, with credit distribution channels multiplying and becoming increasingly embedded across digital and the physical economy. To address the complexity, FinBox, a credit infrastructure and risk solutions provider, has launched Sentinel AI – a unified decisioning platform for digital lenders that brings control, visibility, and efficiency to lending operations through conversational artificial intelligence.
The platform, which already processes more than 5 crore decisions monthly and has facilitated thousands of crores in disbursals, addresses the growing complexity in India’s rapidly transforming digital lending ecosystem, where credit distribution channels are multiplying across both digital and physical economies.
“Five years ago, most loans came through a bank’s website or branch. Today, we’re seeing money move through super-apps, direct selling agents, and dozens of other touchpoints,” said Rajat Deshpande, CEO and Co-Founder of FinBox. “Each channel presents unique fraud patterns, risk profiles, and partnership terms. It’s like trying to conduct traffic at a sixteen-way intersection using separate rulebooks for each road.”
The numbers tell a stark story. India’s digital lending market is driving towards USD 1.3 trillion by 2030, while the average mid-sized NBFC now juggles loans originating from twelve or more distinct channels – quadruple what they managed in 2019. Behind the scenes, this fragmentation has created a resource crisis.
Sentinel is the industry’s response to this fragmentation, offering a unified platform for comprehensive credit decisioning across all origination channels. Enhanced with conversational AI capabilities, Sentinel empowers lending professionals to control everything from fraud checks and identity verification to underwriting and dynamic pricing through generative AI assistants.
“What we’re witnessing is the law of accumulated margin in action,” explains Deshpande. “In digital lending, seemingly minor inefficiencies compound dramatically at scale. When you’re processing millions of decisions monthly, even a 1% improvement in operational efficiency translates to crores in bottom-line impact.”
This principle becomes particularly significant as India’s digital lending volume expands. Sentinel AI, which already processes 5 crore decisions monthly, eliminates multiple layers of inefficiency across Operational Inefficiency, Inconsistent Risk Management, Channel-Specific Blind Spots, Dynamic Pricing Limitations and Compliance Challenges. With RBI’s increased focus on digital lending guidelines, Sentinel AI centralises compliance controls, ensuring consistent application across all touchpoints.
The platform’s conversational AI component represents a significant leap forward, allowing lending teams to implement complex policy changes through natural language rather than technical specifications—reducing deployment time from weeks to minutes while maintaining complete control over the lending strategy.
For players looking to compete in India’s white-hot digital economy, the technology could level the playing field. “Traditional banks and NBFCs have been forced to choose between missing opportunities or accepting unhealthy risk,” explained Srijan Nagar, Co-Founder, FinBox. “Our mission is to eliminate that false choice.”
The platform arrives amid intensifying regulatory scrutiny, enabling unmatched transparency via detailed audit logs and version control.