The Lending Business That Never Charges Interest or Late Fees Nalin Agrawal (SnapMint)

Nalin Agrawal, Co-founder of SnapMint, is a three-time entrepreneur and IIT Bombay alumnus who has quietly built one of India's most efficient consumer financing platforms, scaling from a tiny ₹5 crore revenue to ₹350 crores while serving 7 million monthly users across 23,000 pin codes. In this candid, wide-ranging conversation with host Akshay Datt, Nalin reveals the contrarian principles behind SnapMint's success: why they have never charged a single rupee in late fees, how their data science moat achieves industry-beating credit loss rates, and why they believe India will leapfrog credit cards entirely and go straight to EMI on UPI. What you will learn in this episode: 👉How SnapMint built a 2.5% credit loss rate versus the industry average of 6-8%, using machine learning models powered by 3,000 data factors and a sophisticated real-time fraud detection engine that catches organised fraud patterns in under 10 minutes 👉The four-quadrant framework, Market-Product fit, Product-Channel fit, Channel-Model fit, and Model-Market fit, that Nalin uses to evaluate every business idea and what investors are really looking for at Series A versus Series B 👉Why SnapMint calls itself a transaction-led business and not a lending business, and how this distinction creates fundamentally different and more predictable unit economics compared to traditional balance sheet lenders 👉The story of how a failed advertising campaign in 2016 revealed a 300 million consumer opportunity hiding in plain sight, and how that insight became the founding thesis for SnapMint 👉How India's digital public infrastructure stack, UPI, Aadhaar, Account Aggregator, and the Unified Lending Interface, is enabling fintech companies to serve tier 2 and tier 3 consumers at a cost that was previously impossible If you find this episode valuable,

You can listen to The Lending Business That Never Charges Interest or Late Fees Nalin Agrawal (SnapMint) online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

The Lending Business That Never Charges Interest or Late Fees Nalin Agrawal (SnapMint) is an episode from Founder Thesis by Akshay Datt.

This episode is 95:36 long.

This episode was published on Feb 26, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Founder Thesis when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.