top of page

Vol. 18 Issue 1 (2022)

FinTech Lending in India: Taking Stock of Implications for Privacy and Autonomy

Vidushi Marda and Amber Sinha

In the last five years, the Fintech sector has thrived in India, with Machine Learning (ML) driven credit scoring based on alternative data, emerging as a growing segment. The credit scoring industry in India needs to be viewed in light of a careful examination of rights, inclusion, appropriate safeguards and discrimination, currently missing from the discourse and practices. In this paper, we explain how ML-based credit scoring works, and the regulatory and commercial factors that have enabled and impeded its growth in India. Through legal and technological analysis, richened by insights from qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs and practitioners, we provide a detailed picture of the credit scoring sector, and highlight its spillover privacy and predatory impacts in India.

Author

Vidushi is a Lawyer and Senior Programme Officer at Article 19. Amber is a Lawyer and Trustworthy AI-Senior Fellow at Mozilla Foundation.

bottom of page