Fintechs lose loan steam; Google's AI platform shift
Also in the letter:
Listed fintechs feel the pinch of lenders going slow on unsecured lending
Measuring the impact:
Paytm parent One97 Communications saw personal loan disbursals drop to Rs 1,422 crore, down from Rs 1,746 crore in the December quarter.
Mobikwik's revenue from financial services fell 28% to Rs 402 crore in FY25, compared to Rs 558 crore a year earlier.
Paisabazaar distributed only 517,000 credit cards, one of its key products, compared to 583,000 a year back.
Tell me why:
Impact on biz:
Unsecured consumer loans scaled rapidly, offering quick growth for valuation-hungry fintechs.
Some players have come under pressure on contribution margins.
Fintechs are doubling down on their core payments businesses to extract maximum value.
To reignite growth, many are now shifting focus to secured lending, offering products like loans against property, gold loans, home loans, and others.
Sundar Pichai sees platform shift as AI brings tech research to life
New launches:
Google on Tuesday rolled out AI-powered search in the US, featuring advanced reasoning capabilities
An updated version of Gemini 2.5 Flash will be available from June, announced Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind Technologies.
Pichai also confirmed that Google will expand Gemini to over 200 countries and territories.
Google's AI bet:
Committed $75 billion to building AI data centres
Integrated AI across its entire suite of products and services
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Mid-tier IT poised to win big AI market share, says Sonata CEO:
Nazara Technologies buys game publisher Curve Games:
Former 100X.VC partners target raising Rs 250 crore corpus with early-stage fund:
Global Picks We Are Reading
Happy Wednesday! Digital lenders bore the brunt of the unsecured lending slowdown last fiscal. This and more in today's ETtech Morning Dispatch.■ Changing AI market paradigm■ Nazara's latest buy■ 247VC unveils its India-focussed fundA sharp slowdown in unsecured loan disbursals by banks and non-banking finance companies has weighed on the FY25 performance of listed fintech majors.Large financial institutions are treading cautiously in the unsecured personal loan segment. Rising defaults and the RBI's hawkish stance on consumer lending have made them wary of fintech partnerships. Instead, banks are now looking to leverage fintechs for their technology infrastructure rather than loan distribution.Sundar Pichai, CEO, GoogleArtificial intelligence (AI) has 'brought decades of research within reach of people , businesses and communities around the globe', said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, at the Google I/O developers' conference.Like its competitors, Google has been investing significantly in AI. It has:"In our biggest markets, like the US and India, AI overviews are driving over 10% growth in the types of queries that show them. And what's particularly exciting is how this growth increases over time. It's one of the most successful launches in search in the past decade," said Pichai.ETtech Top 5 and Morning Dispatch are must-reads for India's tech and business leaders, including startup founders, investors, policy makers, industry insiders and employees.Interested? Reach out to us at spotlightpartner@timesinternet.in to explore sponsorship opportunities.Samir Dhir, CEO, Sonata SoftwareMid-tier software service companies are emerging as alternatives for their fatigued large-cap peers to accelerate modernisation and artificial intelligence (AI) projects, said Samir Dhir, chief executive officer at Sonata Software.Nazara Technologies has acquired UK-based PC and console game publisher Curve Games for Rs 247 crore, marking its biggest international acquisition to date.Early-stage venture capital (VC) firm 247VC, founded by former 100X.VC cofounders Yagnesh Sanghrajka and Shashank Randev has launched its first India-focused fund with a base corpus of Rs 200 crore and a green shoe option of Rs 50 crore.■ A billion streams and no fans': Inside a $10 million AI music fraud case ( Wired ■ What it's like to interview for a job at DOGE ( Wired ■ How phony job ads on Facebook and Telegram lure tech workers to scam compounds ( Rest of World
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