Inside a cover-story transformation where AI-driven decisioning, a super app, and a branch-first culture come together to rewire lending for Bharat fast, fair, and human.
There are transformations that announce themselves with fireworks rebrands, flashy launches, and grand keynote promises. And then there are transformations that happen like a rewiring behind the walls: invisible at first, undeniable once the lights come on.
Shriram Finance’s digital journey belongs firmly to the second kind. On any given day, across thousands of touchpoints branches, feet-on-street teams, customer calls, collections routes millions of decisions get made. A loan is structured. A risk is assessed. A payment is taken. A service request is resolved. For decades, these decisions were anchored in one of India’s most formidable strengths: a deeply human network built on familiarity, context, and trust.
But as customers began expecting speed without sacrificing clarity and as digital competition rewrote the rules of convenience Shriram Finance faced a defining challenge: How do you scale trust at digital speed?
Vinod Kumar, the company’s Chief Digital Officer, doesn’t begin answering that question with apps. He begins with infrastructure. “Digital has to be part of everyday credit, servicing, and collections decisions,” he says. “Not a parallel layer.” That single sentence quiet, almost clinical reveals the ambition. This transformation isn’t about creating a digital storefront. It’s about embedding digital into the core of the business so deeply that the organisation stops thinking of it as “digital” at all.
“Digital must blend into the business not sit outside it.” — Vinod Kumar, CDO, Shriram Finance
The Work No One Sees: Rebuilding the Pipes
In the early chapters of many enterprise digital stories, the spotlight lands on front-end experiences. At Shriram Finance, the first major effort went into the plumbing: integrating data, rebuilding workflows, and modernising the risk and decisioning machinery that determines how credit behaves.
Vinod describes it as a pursuit of speed, quality, and fairness, all at once without losing the human connect that has defined Shriram Finance for decades. That balancing act matters more here than in most financial institutions because the customer base is vast and varied: transporters, small merchants, semi-formal MSMEs, first-time borrowers, and families for whom a loan decision isn’t a transaction it’s a turning point.
To change outcomes at this scale, digital can’t remain a shiny overlay. It has to become the mechanism through which the business operates.
So the company began rethinking the fundamentals: how data moves, how underwriting decisions are structured, how service workflows are triggered, and how collections interventions are prioritised. When those “pipes” work as one, the transformation stops being an initiative and becomes a new operating model.
“We focus on outcomesnot adoption alone.”
Shriram One: Where the Transformation Becomes Tangible
If the backend is the engine room, the most visible symbol of Shriram Finance’s reinvention is Shriram One a super app that has evolved from a service-first tool into a full acquisition, servicing, and payments ecosystem.
Today, Shriram One is more than a digital window. It’s a platform that integrates UPI, Bharat Bill Pay, lending journeys, and customer service requests into a single experience. The scale is significant: over 2 crore downloads and 1.4 crore active users.
But in a cover story, the real measure of technology isn’t usage it’s what changes in the customer’s life.
Shriram Finance’s paperless, eKYC-led processes have shrunk approval timelines from 24–48 hours to 20–25 minutes. That difference isn’t merely operational. For a borrower trying to move quickly an MSME chasing inventory, a transporter needing funds to keep wheels moving, a family bridging a financial gap minutes matter.
And the app has changed the growth story too. Digital-led acquisition through Shriram One has shifted from an 80:20 existing-to-new customer mix to 40:60 in favour of new customers. In other words, digital is no longer only servicing the familiar; it’s expanding access.
“Customer trust has to remain central to digital growth.”
AI That Doesn’t Just Advise, It Decides
Ask most leaders about AI in finance and you’ll hear about pilots, experimentation, or “AI-assisted insights.” Vinod’s language is different. At Shriram Finance, AI and machine learning aren’t perched on top of decisions; they sit inside the workflow, shaping outcomes.
That distinction matters. Shriram’s ML models power end-to-end decisioning from risk-based pricing and approvals to early warning signals and customer segmentation. In a large, diverse NBFC portfolio, these are not theoretical applications. They are the heartbeats of the business.
Vinod is clear about why AI excites him most: it allows Shriram Finance to expand access while strengthening risk performance. This is especially critical when your customer base spans varied income patterns and fragmented documentation styles. Traditional underwriting alone can be slow or conservative; purely digital underwriting can be blind to context. Embedded AI can bring precision, consistency, and scalability without erasing the need for human judgment.
The models don’t merely “inform” decisions. They participate in them.
The New Backbone: Data as an Operating System
AI is only as strong as the data it learns from. So, the company’s deeper shift one that rarely makes headlines is how data shapes lending and services across the lifecycle.
Machine-learning models evaluate thousands of data points to recommend the right price, tenure, and loan structure for each customer. The promise here isn’t only speed. It’s relevance: structuring credit that fits real lives, not just standard templates.
This data-led approach is also reshaping collections. AI-led collections enable more precise, risk-aligned interventions the kind that help a business protect portfolio quality while also approaching customers with context and timing rather than blunt force.
Shriram Finance’s shift in digital acquisition mix is one proof point. Another is the ability to scale decisioning without diluting discipline. When data becomes central, judgement becomes more consistent; when models become explainable, trust becomes defensible. This is what it looks like when data stops being a reporting function and becomes an operating system.
The Trust Equation: Security as Architecture, Not Afterthought
A transformation built on digital rails must survive the realities of cyber risk. And in financial services, security failures don’t just create losses; they fracture trust.
Shriram Finance’s security approach is built into every stage of its architecture. Vinod describes a layered model that covers asset protection, data security, and network resilience. This includes continuous vulnerability monitoring, real-time fraud detection, strong encryption and data masking, and a zero-trust network design.
There’s also a governance layer aligned with RBI consent and data frameworks, with clear controls around data usage. As Shriram Finance scales AI and automation, it places equal emphasis on privacy, fairness, and explainability because speed without trust is a short-lived advantage.
Digital Inclusion, Powered by a Human Network
Shriram Finance is not a digital-native lender trying to create branches. It’s a branch-strong lender using digital to extend its reach and sharpen its decisioning.
That changes everything about how inclusion is executed.
Digital innovation helps capture leads and qualify customers at scale, but fulfilment remains tightly connected to branches a critical advantage for semi-formal MSMEs and first-time borrowers who may need reassurance, handholding, or context-based support. This hybrid model digital for speed, branches for trust makes the transformation more inclusive by design.
To ensure digital tools stay accessible, the company invests in vernacular UI/UX, referral programs, loyalty initiatives, and simplified onboarding. These are not merely growth tactics. They’re bridges connecting customers to digital experiences without forcing them to abandon what they trust.
In this model, the branch isn’t legacy. It’s leverage.
Legacy vs New Tech? Shriram Refuses the False Choice
In many large organisations, the modernisation conversation becomes a tug-of-war: rip and replace versus patch and preserve. Shriram Finance doesn’t treat it as an either-or decision. Digital acts as a high-quality sourcing, decisioning, and enablement layer, while branches remain the centre of gravity. Systems like Ziva 2.0 modernise loan origination through in-house platforms without disrupting frontline workflows.
The intent is pragmatic: compress onboarding timelines, improve throughput, and still keep room for human judgement where required. In lending, context is often the difference between a good decision and a rigid one. Shriram Finance is engineering for both: automation where it helps, discretion where it matters.
Partnerships With a Filter: Speed Without Compromising Control
Fintech partnerships can be rocket fuel or a risk if governance and integration are weak. Shriram Finance treats partnerships as a catalyst, used selectively.
Core platforms such as loan origination and risk engines are built in-house. Partnerships are explored where they add speed, specialised capability, or integration advantage without diluting governance standards or operational realities.
Collaborators are evaluated on alignment with Shriram Finance’s scale, standards, and on-ground presence. This isn’t innovation theatre. It’s a disciplined approach to building an ecosystem that complements the company’s strengths rather than competing with them.
Ethical AI: Guardrails for Scale
As AI becomes more embedded in decisioning, ethics becomes operational, not philosophical. Shriram Finance’s approach includes governance frameworks, fairness checks, explainable decisioning, and continuous monitoring built into model deployment.
Importantly, human judgement remains integral. Frontline teams retain flexibility to apply context where needed, ensuring the system remains inclusive and responsive to real-world nuance. The focus is transparency and responsible scaling building automation that expands access rather than narrowing it.
How the Transformation Is Measured: Outcomes Over Optics
Digital transformations often fall into the trap of celebrating adoption metrics downloads, logins, features shipped. Vinod’s lens is tighter and tougher: measure outcomes.
Shriram Finance tracks indicators that tie directly to business impact: reduction in turnaround time, growth in digital-led acquisition, improvement in portfolio quality, higher straight-through processing, increased disbursal throughput per executive, and customer engagement metrics such as active users on the Shriram One app.
These KPIs aren’t chosen for storytelling. They’re chosen for accountability because they reflect changes in experience, efficiency, and risk.
A New Kind of Scale
Shriram Finance’s reinvention is not loud. It doesn’t posture as disruption for its own sake. Instead, it is building something rarer: a model where digital speed and human trust are not competing forces.
The organisation is rewiring itself so that AI improves fairness, data improves relevance, security protects trust, and branches remain a living advantage not a historical footnote. The result is a transformation that feels less like a tech overhaul and more like a new blueprint for serving Bharat at scale.
In the end, what Vinod Kumar is building is not just a super app, or a set of models, or a modernised workflow stack. It is a lending institution that can move faster without becoming colder smarter without becoming opaque more automated without becoming less human.
And that may be the most modern strategy of all.