Making Credit Worthy: From Capital Float to axio
By Sashank Rishyasringa & Gaurav Hinduja
Changing one’s name… few transformations are as radical. But for us, it is the natural culmination of a journey that has shaped who we are, and how we aspire to make credit a force for good in India’s growth story. Today, we are excited to share that Capital Float, Walnut & Walnut 369 will now be called axio — a single brand unifying our checkout finance, credit, and money management tools for our customers. It’s the start of a new chapter, one built on foundation stones forged over time.
We started Capital Float in 2013, fresh-faced and starry-eyed, eager to democratize access to credit in India through technology. The toolkit was sparse at the time — eKYC, UPI, AA, eNACH and various other acronyms were still distant specks on the horizon. Returning from our first RBI meeting, our advisor asked us, “What is your long-term vision?” “India’s first digital bank”, we replied in unison, not fully knowing what that meant or how to get there.
Along the way, we built some amazing things from scratch — India’s first 9-second loan to a kirana store owner, the first co-lending platform, embedded finance 1.0, and an LMS-as-a-service. We also got plenty wrong, iterating several times in an environment that evolved alongside us.
Three years ago, coming out of a tough period as a company, we shared our learnings in a post. Little did we know that a few months later, we would plunge again into a macro crisis with Covid. Our learnings held up well; but we also realized that we had not been bold enough in some of our key choices. So we pushed again — narrowing customer focus, consolidating products and deepening bets on the team — carving out a trajectory that was both new and familiar at the same time.
Startup journeys are rarely linear, much as we would wish them to be. We would now contend that non-linearity does more than just build character. If you stay in the game, it builds unique muscles, insight, and tribal knowledge that allow you to build back better than before.
This has been our path. We are excited for what it now sets us up to do — to enable the start of a credit journey for millions of Indian consumers. To be there consistently for them, delivering financial products that blend empathy, transparency and rigour. To make credit worthy for all.
As we step into this new phase, we thought to share some of our reflections and takeaways as fellow entrepreneurs. We invite you to read about our journey, and check out our cool new brand 😎.
#1 Pivots build unique muscles
Capital Float started in SME finance, as step one to building retail credit in India. We then diversified to offer credit to consumers as well. A couple of years later, we chose to double-down here: we had found a bigger market opportunity, and a model that was scaling faster, more efficiently, and needed singular focus to win.
On the face of it, this was a big pivot. But in reality, many of the learnings from our SME origins directly shaped our approach to consumer credit. They drove us to make choices that were not mainstream in consumer fintech at the time, from acquiring customers without marketing, to building collections in-house and operating as a regulated NBFC. Today, these form the bedrock of how we scale as a business.
Customer growth: Over the past three years, we have grown from 400,000 to 4.5 million credit customers, now adding a million new customers each quarter. This has been driven by partnerships with merchants, where we are embedded at checkout. Several of these key partnerships actually started in SME finance. From Amazon, our longest-standing partner, we learnt from the best how to put the customer first as we made this transition. Our original hypothesis — that digital ecosystems were the way to scale credit to the last mile — blitz-scaled when applied to consumers, versus our attempts with SMEs a few years earlier. Same insight, different place, different time; but, with experience.
Risk management: Over the same period, we scaled GMV and revenue by 3x each year. But what we are more proud of is reducing default rates by 70%, to 1% (cohort & GNPA) during such rapid growth. Globally, it has been fashionable to talk about BNPL as payments. Given our roots, we always approached it as a credit-first business. We embraced regulation early on, and with it stricter norms of governance. We operated through multiple cycles in India — DeMo, GST, IL&FS, Covid — which stress-tested our underwriting and collections models. And so, as we enter a new macro environment, we look at it with the caution that it deserves, but also with familiar eyes.
#2 Scarcity creates bigger playbooks
For more than half our customers today, we are their first unsecured credit line. This is both a huge opportunity and a huge responsibility.
In the West, BNPL emerged as a more convenient payment option for a generation stacked with credit card debt. However, convenience can be a tricky value proposition to manage in finance. In boom times, it drives customers to load up. And, when cycles turn, no one wants to pay for it. Margins compress and defaults rise, especially when the system has lost sight of customer leverage.
Through eight years of lending, we have seen our shares of wins and losses during such moments. In India, however, we entrepreneurs have a distinct advantage. There is a deep structural gap in retail credit that refuses to go away; but has to. In our population of 1.4 billion, only 30 million have a credit card. Yet, 150 million now actively transact in our vibrant digital economy. Responsible credit, that solves affordability through tech, is the only answer.
Like most banks, we too started out looking at the world in terms of ‘products’ — personal loans, business loans, cards, etc. But once we put the customer at the centre, a new playbook emerged. In affordability-focused checkout finance, we found the perfect tool to enable the start of a credit journey for millions of customers. Our goal is to be there along that journey, meeting larger credit needs as they arise; to match our customers’ consistency with products that grow with them and reward such discipline.
#3 To go forward, go back to the “Why”
axio comes from ‘axios’, which means ‘worthy’ in Greek. As we thought through this transition, we wanted an identity that touched a nerve and kept us honest; not a new coat of paint.
Like most fintech entrepreneurs in India, we started out with a sense of idealism around expanding access to finance. In all the sound and fury around KYC modes, repayment instruments, FLDGs, and PPIs, it is easy to lose sight of this. It is even easier in consumer finance, where public critiques of credit, both justified and alarmist, are the norm.
The truth is that in India, we have a somewhat tortured relationship with credit. We need credit to grow, yet often associate it with a loss of agency. The fact is that we aspire to become a $5 trillion economy by the second half of this decade. No country in history has achieved this level of growth within such a short time frame without a 2x expansion in retail credit. So it’s critical we fix this relationship, if we are all to progress together.
At axio, our mission is to ensure that credit and finance are tools that everyone can proactively use to win in life. Not how we or society define(s) winning; but what each individual sees as important to their own growth.
How do we do this? We’ve ripped up the red tape of traditional credit systems, to give everybody an equal starting line. We reward consistency in your financial behaviour, with credit that grows as you grow, recognizing that life is not a straight line. We do this with rigour, by mastering risk and giving you control over your own finances.
For far too long, we as an industry have obsessed over who is credit worthy. It’s time to make credit worthy for all.
It is an aspiration that we may sometimes fall short on, but will always strive towards.
Team axio
