Faster credit reporting—through weekly incremental updates from July—is set to particularly benefit digital non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) by curbing loan stacking, where borrowers exploit the blackout window between loan sanction and reporting to take multiple small loans.
Credit bureau and fintech executives told Mint that the compliance requirement is especially important for digital personal loans, buy now, pay later (BNPL), and other frequently disbursed unsecured products, where borrowing patterns can shift within days rather than months.
“In a traditional monthly reporting cycle, the lifecycle of a 15-day BNPL transaction or a 30-day micro-loan is essentially a blind spot…it begins and ends before the data ever reaches the bureau,” said Aditya B. Chatterjee, managing director of credit bureau Equifax India.
And borrowers “used to exploit this particular window of a blind spot in the (bureau reporting) system”, said Sugandh Saxena, chief executive of self-regulatory organization Fintech Association for Consumer Empowerment (FACE), adding that “fintechs would greatly benefit” from fresher bureau data.
That is because digital NBFCs dominate the personal-loan market by volume, accounting for 78% of sanctioned loans in the first nine months of 2025-26, even though their share by value was only 19%, according to FACE data.
Eliminating blind spots
Credit data from banks, NBFCs, and fintech lenders used to be updated with bureaus on a monthly cycle, but in practice, taking 30-45 days from disbursal to reflection in a borrower’s file. This lag left lenders working with stale information, creating room for loan stacking and consumer disputes over repayments or closed accounts.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) began tightening the cycle in early 2025 through its 6 January Master Direction on Credit Information Reporting, which required lenders and credit information companies to update records every fortnight.
Then, in a July 2025 speech, RBI deputy governor M. Rajeshwar Rao signalled a more ambitious goal of “real-time or near-real-time” reporting to sharpen underwriting and improve consumer experience. This direction was formalized in November 2025, when the central bank amended the framework to mandate weekly incremental reporting from July 2026.
Chatterjee noted that while the old monthly reporting cycle created a 40-45-day blackout window, the newer cycle would reduce it to about 6-7 days, a shift he said would bring “much more transparency and lessening of consumer disputes”.
“In a daily reporting environment, a consumer cannot take out three digital personal loans from three different apps in 48 hours because the subsequent lenders will immediately see the first disbursement on our updated reports,” he added.
FACE's Saxena echoed that view, saying the benefits would extend across products rather than to a single narrow category. She said fintech lenders have often relied on sources such as account aggregators—RBI-regulated systems that, with a user’s consent, let financial firms access bank account data—as well as app-based data scraped from users’ SMS inboxes and other phone data shared via permissions to understand spending behaviour and repayment stress.
“With bureau records now being updated more frequently fintechs lenders will have access to much fresher and more reliable data for risk management, both before disbursal, while underwriting a borrower, and after disbursal, when monitoring whether the customer is taking on more debt,” she added.
This need for timely data is magnified by the rapid growth and scale of digital lending. The sanction value for digital personal loans by digital NBFCs rose from ₹92,842 crore in 2022-23 to ₹1.31 trillion in 2023-24 and ₹1.55 trillion in 2024-25, according to FACE data. In the first nine months of 2025-26 alone, sanction value already reached ₹1.53 trillion across 99 million loans—up about 33% in value and 9% in volume year-on-year.
One step at a time
However, some fintech lenders caution that benefits will vary across different business models.
Satyam Kumar, chief executive of digital NBFC LoanTap, said faster reporting can reduce overexposure of the same customer because customers typically try to get approved from wherever possible.
FACE’s latest report showed that younger and smaller-town borrowers continue to carry most of the stress, with loans 90 days past due (DPD) at 3.3% for borrowers under 25 and 2.2% in tier-III cities and beyond. Fintechs also see persistent risk in sub- ₹10,000 personal loans, with 4.1% of dues past 31-90 days and 4.8% outstanding for 91-180 days as of June 2025.
“For some lenders (both digital and offline), daily reporting will definitely become a significant compliance effort, raising server impact and the cost structure, but that cost and compliance layer far outweighs the benefits that you get,” he added.
FACE’s Saxena said earlier pilots between fintech lenders and a bureau had tested more frequent, even near-daily, reporting, but only for incremental changes such as new disbursals or loan closures, not the entire loan book each day, because reporting the full portfolio daily would sharply raise operational and compliance burdens.
But defaults are often concentrated in a small sliver of borrowers, and “if lenders are able to sort of address that sharply and finally using fresh data, then it would help weed out delinquent borrowers earlier,” she added.
A senior credit bureau executive, on the condition of anonymity, said daily reporting poses a huge challenge due to the surge in data volume: a lender that previously submitted 100 records a month would see processing rise roughly 30-fold if it reported its full portfolio daily.
However, since full-scale daily reporting remains 12-24 months away due to infrastructure constraints, weekly incremental reporting covering only accounts with changes—such as disbursals, repayments, or closures—will serve as a bridge to a near-real-time system.