MobiKwik Receives RBI NBFC Licence to Launch Direct Co-Lending Operations

MobiKwik Financial Services Private Limited, a wholly owned unit of One MobiKwik Systems Limited, received its final Certificate of Registration from the Reserve Bank of India on 6 November 2026. The approval lets it run as a Non-Banking Financial Company under Section 45-IA of the RBI Act, 1934, following an in-principle nod in April 2026. The Economic Times reports the fintech firm plans to start direct NBFC lending within three to six months.

This is a structural shift. MobiKwik moves from a pure Lending Service Provider, which only distributes loans for other lenders, to a direct balance-sheet credit originator. Sahi Markets reports the company wants to raise lending's share of total revenue from 25-30% to 50% over the next six to eight quarters, with quarterly disbursals of Rs 1,500-2,000 crore, building to Rs 5,000 crore over three to four years. ET BFSI puts its Q2 FY27 digital lending disbursals at Rs 1,083 crore across 11 partner lenders, up 34% year-on-year, with gross profit from financial services up 2.2 times.

The company will run this book on an asset-light co-lending model. ScanX reports a 10:90 split: MobiKwik holds 10% of the loan principal on its own books, and partner banks and NBFCs hold the rest. Products will include personal loans and Buy Now Pay Later for retail customers, and working capital and merchant loans for small businesses, across Tier 1, 2 and 3 towns. The Economic Times and Elets BFSI report the NBFC will run on MobiKwik's existing technology stack: alternative-data risk scoring and collection engines. Upasana Taku, Co-founder, Executive Director and CFO, said the company's 196 million users and 5 million merchants stand to gain from direct lending, with underwriting and lending kept prudent.

What this means for BFSI jobs

Running a regulated NBFC on your own balance sheet needs people a pure lending-distribution business does not. Compliance comes first: expect hiring for NBFC Regulatory Compliance Managers, Secretarial Officers and RBI Reporting Specialists, who handle regulatory filings, capital adequacy tracking and statutory audits under RBI's Scale-Based Regulations.

Credit risk and underwriting teams will also grow. MobiKwik underwrites unsecured retail and merchant working-capital loans using alternative data, so it needs Underwriting Managers, Credit Risk Analysts and Data Scientists to build and refine scoring models and set risk limits for borrowers outside the metros.

The 10:90 co-lending structure needs relationship and operations talent too: Institutional Partnership Managers and Bank Alliance Leads who can negotiate co-lending agreements, run escrow accounts, manage First Loss Default Guarantee arrangements, and reconcile accounts between partners.

Direct credit exposure also means direct collections exposure. Lenders in this position hire Collections Leads, Field Recovery Managers and Digital Resolution Specialists to keep non-performing assets down across retail and MSME books, in cities and smaller towns alike.

Finploy's own listings bear this last point out: collections roles carry a median fixed pay of about Rs 2.6 lakh a year, and 82% of them sit outside India's 8 metro cities, because loan recovery, unlike head-office underwriting, follows the borrower rather than the bank branch. As co-lending NBFCs such as MobiKwik scale disbursals into Tier 2 and 3 towns, this is where much of the new collections hiring will land, not in Mumbai or Bengaluru head offices.

Separately, Finploy's own job data for 7 November 2026 shows 44,990 open positions across Indian BFSI, led by Mumbai (11,225), Bengaluru (1,161), Pune (1,120), Chennai (1,023) and Hyderabad (823). Compliance, underwriting and co-lending management skills are in demand across all these centres as fintech platforms like MobiKwik take on balance-sheet lending alongside bank capital.