The announcement marks a significant strategic shift from loan distributor to direct lender. For two years, Airtel has been quietly building its lending service provider platform, disbursing over Rs 9,000 crore in loans through partners like Bajaj Finance, DMI Finance, and L&T Finance, with strong delinquency outcomes. The NBFC move is effectively Airtel deciding it wants to own the balance sheet, not just the customer relationship.
“Retail lending has witnessed increased competitive intensity post-Covid from incumbents like Bajaj Finance, Aditya Birla Capital, Jio Financial, along with renewed focus from private and public sector banks,” Sunny Agrawal, Head of Fundamental Research at SBI Securities, told ET Markets. “Airtel Money’s success would hinge on product offerings, risk management, customer acquisition, and navigating a crowded industry.”
India’s formal credit-to-GDP ratio sits at just 53%, according to Care Edge Ratings, reflecting a yawning gap that every lender from Mumbai boardrooms to Silicon Valley-backed fintechs is racing to fill. Airtel wants a piece of that white space, and it believes it has the tools to grab it fast.
The NBFC license arrived from the Reserve Bank of India on February 13, 2026. Airtel will contribute 70% of the Rs 20,000 crore capitalisation, with the promoter group through Bharti Enterprises Limited bringing in the remaining 30%.
The numbers Airtel brings to the table are not trivial. Airtel Money already counts 201 million total customers and 108 million monthly transacting users as of December 2025. Its monthly loan disbursement run rate has crossed Rs 500 crore, implying an annualised book size of roughly Rs 6,000 crore, with deposits of Rs 4,300 crore. Its FY26 GMV run rate stands at Rs 4.6 lakh crore, with revenues running at Rs 3200 crore, up 16% year-on-year, at a healthy 10% EBITDA margin.
Over the past two years, it quietly built one of India’s more formidable lending service provider platforms by distributing loans through partners including Bajaj Finance, DMI Finance, L&T Finance, Fibe, Credit Saison, Moneyview, and Kreditbee and racking up over Rs 9,000 crore in cumulative disbursements with, by its own account, best-in-class delinquency outcomes. Now it wants to ditch the middleman role and lend from its own balance sheet.The financial headroom to do so exists, analysts say. JP Morgan estimates Airtel is generating Rs 77,000 crore in operating free cash flow in FY26 on a run-rate basis. Even after Rs 34,000 crore in spectrum and AGR payments due over the next four years, that leaves roughly Rs 43000 crore in deployable cash flows which is more than enough to fund the NBFC build-out over several years.
JM Financial concurs, noting that the equity infusion over the coming years is “small” relative to Bharti’s potential consolidated free cash flow of and its current market capitalisation.
Still, analysts are not waving this through without caveats.
“NBFC would be a more capital-intensive business and different from running a digital platform where Bharti Airtel acts as a distributor,” Morgan Stanley noted, adding that while the group has been “prudent in capital allocation” in recent years, the current investments will increase overall capex intensity.
JP Morgan flagged a more pointed concern: Airtel’s key challenge in scaling the business profitably will be its “lack of underwriting experience and a short track record of static pool data” for borrowers on its LSP platform. A strong alternate data engine, built on 500-plus data scientists and a 370-million-plus subscriber base, helps, but it is no substitute for years of credit cycle experience.
Citi, while broadly constructive, cautioned that “optimal capital deployment with attractive risk-adjusted returns and meaningful scale-up typically evolves over several years for lending businesses.”
The elephant in the room is Jio. Reliance Industries built Jio Platforms into a sprawling consumer ecosystem and then layered Jio Financial Services on top of it, backed by near-unlimited capital and the full weight of India’s largest conglomerate. The question now being asked is whether Airtel can replicate that playbook with considerably less firepower.
Agrawal of SBI Securities puts the challenge plainly: “Airtel Money’s ability to cross-sell to existing telecom customers would be a key strategic focus — instant smartphone financing, unsecured lending, buy now pay later to existing telecom customers, and working capital finance for their millions of merchants and distribution partners.”
That cross-sell thesis is central to Airtel’s pitch. Management frames the NBFC as a “natural adjacency” — a way to monetise a subscriber base and data stack that already exist, rather than building from scratch. The Airtel Thanks app becomes the distribution highway; 500-plus data scientists become the underwriting engine.
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