RBI report: ULI gains scale as lenders, data services boost adoption in FY25

The Unified Lending Interface (ULI), India’s digital public infrastructure for frictionless credit delivery, has seen a sharp rise in adoption over the past year, showed the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) report on Trends and Progress of Banking in India 2024-25.

As of 12 December, a total of 64 lenders have been onboarded to the central bank's digital public infrastructure for the lending ecosystem, including 41 banks and 23 non-banking financial companies (NBFC). This marks a significant jump from the previous year, when 36 lenders were live on the platform as of 6 December 2024.

The expanded lender base reflects rising confidence in the ULI’s standardized, protocol-driven architecture, which allows seamless access to multiple data sources through a single integration.

The number of data services available on the platform has also expanded rapidly. Lenders are now using over 136 data services for 12 different loan journeys, compared with just over 50 data services a year ago.

These services span authentication and verification tools, land records from eight states—up from six states in 2023-24—satellite data, transliteration, property search, dairy insights, and credit guarantee-related information.

Additional data sources are being onboarded to further enhance credit underwriting and decision-making.

A UPI-like lending platform

Originally launched as the Public Tech Platform for Frictionless Credit, the ULI began its pilot phase in August 2023. By December 2024, more than 600,000 loans worth ₹27,000 crore had been disbursed using APIs (application programming interfaces) from the platform, including 160,000 micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) loans amounting to ₹14,500 crore.

While updated disbursement figures were not disclosed in 2024-25, the sharp rise in participating lenders and data services points to deeper and broader usage of the platform.

In April, the ULI facilitated the disbursal of over 1.4 million loans amounting to ₹65,000 crore, the RBI’s deputy governor T. Rabi Sankar said while speaking at the IIMA Ventures’ Bharat Inclusion Summit 2.0.

Sankar had said the disbursals included a substantial number of Kisan Credit Card loans and MSME loans.

The ULI provides banks and NBFCs with access to key financial and non-financial data of borrowers, enabling more efficient credit decisions. It helps lenders improve credit underwriting and disbursal, while allowing consumers to choose from a wider range of loan offers.

“It is a platform that has lenders on one side and the data that is required for these lenders to process loans on the other side. At present, more than 60 such data sources have been linked to this platform,” he said.

The ULI is also expanding its reach beyond mainstream banks. Through the e-Kisan Credit Card (e-KCC) platform of the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), it is enabling customers of district central co-operative banks and regional rural banks to access digital credit more efficiently.