Navi is using AI to build credit and fraud models, says Sachin Bansal

Around 2015, back when Sachin Bansal was still running Flipkart, he had a conversation with Nandan Nilekani about the untapped potential of UPI. A decade later, India has made huge strides in payments, and Bansal has moved on to a far tougher problem: extending credit to a billion people through Navi.

Speaking at the Global Fintech Festival, Bansal said Navi is already deploying AI across its operations, from credit and fraud-detection models to coding, customer support, marketing and feature engineering.

AI alone won’t be a moat

Bansal is clear that access to AI alone will not be enough to set companies apart. As building software becomes cheaper and easier, he said the advantage will increasingly come from choosing the right problems and building capabilities that are difficult to replicate. That thinking also shapes Navi’s approach to financial services.

Bansal said the company prefers to “go deep” rather than operate only as a technology or distribution platform. In areas such as credit and insurance, that means building capabilities across the value chain, including credit decisioning and risk models. Companies that take on harder problems and build systems that are difficult to copy are more likely to create lasting institutions, he said.

The comments come weeks after Navi raised $100 million from Prosus, marking its first institutional fundraise. Navi Finserv had crossed ₹13,000 crore in assets under management, while the group had turned profitable on a consolidated basis in the fourth quarter of FY26, according to the company.

Banks and fintechs are complementary

Bansal also sees banks and fintechs as complementary. Banks remain regulated and trusted stores of value, while fintech companies can focus on making financial products simpler and easier to access. He believes India has already reached a basic level of financial inclusion through bank accounts and digital payments, but sees significant room to widen access to products such as credit and insurance.

Bansal described credit as essential to India’s economic ambitions, placing it alongside electricity, education and healthcare. Navi’s long-term ambition, he said, is to provide access to credit to one billion people, even if achieving that takes decades. Bansal also argued that customer data should ultimately belong to the customer and be portable between authorised institutions, with the necessary privacy safeguards in place.

As AI becomes more widely available, his larger point is that technology itself will matter less than what companies decide to do with it.