New Delhi, Sept. 1 -- India's digital lending story has largely been about what happens before a loan is disbursed: faster underwriting, digital onboarding, automated decisions, and wider access to credit. The less visible part of that journey is what happens when a borrower misses a payment.

Collections has traditionally remained more dependent on people, call centres, spreadsheets, agency networks, and fragmented systems. That creates a different problem as lending scales. A lender may have increasingly sophisticated systems to decide who should receive credit, but the process for helping that borrower return to repayment can still be far less structured.

That gap is now putting collections under a different kind of pressure. Lenders ...