India, June 20 -- Across India, millions of salaried workers teachers, clerks, factory hands, mid-level professionals live in a gap between when they earn and when they're paid. That gap, anywhere from a week to a month in any given crisis, has historically been filled by the worst actors in finance. Informal moneylenders. Predatory digital apps that harvest personal data and weaponise it at the first sign of a missed EMI. Credit products designed not around the borrower's ability to repay, but around their inability to refuse.

The tragedy isn't that this credit exists. Credit, in any functioning economy, is essential. The tragedy is that for this segment of borrowers stable, salaried, creditworthy the pricing has never reflected the act...