Since its merger-led transition into a bank in 2024, Slice has been moving away from an almost fully unsecured lending portfolio to a large, secured loan book, the bank’s top executive told Mint. Managing director and chief executive Rajan Bajaj said secured lending, which currently accounts for about 22% of the company’s portfolio, is expected to become the dominant segment over the next decade.
“For us, secured business is growing faster than unsecured and will continue this way. Long term, the majority of the book will be secured and diversified,” Bajaj said.
Slice, which built its early business on unsecured consumer credit, is now leveraging its banking licence to expand into asset-backed segments. Founded in 2016 by Bajaj, the consumer fintech startup became a regulated bank after merging with North East Small Finance Bank in 2024.
At the time of the merger, secured lending accounted for just about 4% of the total loan book, largely from the small finance bank, while Slice itself had no secured portfolio. In FY26, Slice’s assets under management rose 78% year-on-year to ₹4,554 crore.
Like most financial services firms, lending remains a key revenue driver for the company. “Loan against property is going to be a big segment for us. Embedded finance is another area where we want to be the partner of choice,” Bajaj said. “We are now also seeing very strong results on the merchant side where we are doing secured loans and loans to small merchants.”
Slice, however, did not share details of all sub-segments within its secured lending portfolio and the size of each.
‘Meaningfully different’ in three years
As a bank, the company also operates in savings and payment, and merchant services, apart from lending. Slice currently has more than 5 million savings accounts and around 20 million users in total. Deposits more than doubled to ₹5,111 crore at the end of FY26 from ₹2,446 crore a year earlier, Bajaj told Mint. “Secured lending is fundamentally about having the right cost of funds and as a bank we now have that which changes everything and helps us build our secured lending portfolio more organically,” he added.
Over the next two to three years, the composition of the book will look “meaningfully different”, Bajaj said, without sharing exact projections. “We are not going to push growth beyond what the business can absorb responsibly. The pace has to be right, not just the direction,” he added.
Slice’s pivot comes as unsecured lending is showing early signs of a recovery. Mint reported recently that digital lenders were seeing growth stabilise in FY26 after a regulatory-led slowdown, with unsecured personal loans driving the rebound.
However, caution persists as credit agencies highlight how unsecured digital players may require additional capital over the next 12–18 months amid asset quality pressures, Mint reported earlier this week.
Execution and other risks
Secured lending comes with execution challenges, Bajaj noted. “Secured lending today still needs physical infrastructure… underwriting, collateral validation and understanding customer income streams still happens through branches,” he said.
The company is expanding its branch network to support this transition, even as it builds a digital-first model. While the company, as a virtue of being associated with the small finance bank, has 183 branches as of March 31, 2025, Slice has opened its modern, digital-first branches, in areas like Bengaluru, Gurugram and its latest branch in Guwahati.
“The longer-term vision is that India shifts to a fully tokenized model of secured lending, where a lot of the physical dependency goes away. We believe that will happen. But today it is not there yet, so branches remain the channel,” Bajaj added.
Bajaj also said Slice’s ambition is to become for India what NuBank is for Brazil. However, many industry experts disagree with this optimism, arguing that a large-scale digital bank may never actually emerge in India. A July 2025 report by Bernstein argued that digital-only banks face limited disruption potential in India due to already deep credit penetration, low fee structures and the advantage incumbents hold through branch networks.
Bajaj countered this, arguing that the opportunity lies in improving product quality and cost, not just expanding access. “The 300 million (underserved) customers in India already have access to credit… but access to high-quality products like credit cards is limited to about 40–50 million people,” he said.
Slice is also exploring a fresh round of funding. A report by The Economic Times said the company is in discussions to raise $50-100 million at a lower valuation than its previous round. Bajaj declined to comment on fundraising plans. Before its merger, the company had raised more than $250 million from investors including Tiger Global, Insight Partners and Advent International.
The Reserve Bank of India, while acknowledging the need for new banks, has remained cautious on granting new licences. Applications by Ujjivan Small Finance Bank and Jana Small Finance Bank to transition into universal banks have faced hurdles of late.
Mint reported in February that Slice posted a net profit of ₹27.97 crore for the first nine months of FY26, marking a turnaround from a ₹217 crore loss in FY25. The company also reported total income of ₹632 crore in the first half of FY26, surpassing its full-year FY25 income of ₹604 crore. Bajaj said the company has turned profitable for the full year as well, but declined to share detailed numbers.