Startup Deep Dive : Finzy — fined by RBI, then posted its first profit the same year

In March 2025, the Reserve Bank of India fined Bridge Fintech Solutions, the company behind the peer-to-peer lending platform Finzy, ₹10 lakh (about $10,400 at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) for disbursing loans without getting individual lender approval first. The order closed a case that had opened 18 months earlier, when RBI inspectors found the platform quietly carrying credit risk it was never licensed to carry.

The same financial year, Finzy posted its first disclosed profit in company history: ₹67.3 lakh on revenue of ₹13.8 crore, after a loss of ₹8.8 crore just two years before. A platform fined for cutting compliance corners and a platform turning its first profit turn out to be the same twelve months of the same company. What happened in between is the story.

Quick facts

What they do

Finzy is a peer-to-peer lending marketplace: it does not lend its own money. Instead it matches individuals who want to invest cash for a return against individuals who want a personal loan, and it takes a fee for making the introduction, doing the credit checks and collecting the repayments. Borrowers use it for the reasons most people borrow — debt consolidation, medical bills, weddings, home improvement, education — in ticket sizes the company’s own site lists as ₹5,000 to ₹10,00,000. Lenders use it as a fixed-income-style investment, putting money into small slices of many loans in the hope of a return the platform advertises as up to 13% a year. The whole thing runs on a licence: Finzy operates as a Non-Banking Financial Company – Peer to Peer Lending Platform (NBFC-P2P), a category the Reserve Bank of India created and regulates specifically so P2P platforms cannot behave like unlicensed banks.

The origin

Amit More was a banker who had grown curious about alternative finance long before regulation caught up with the idea. His opening came from Delhi, not Bengaluru: in April 2016 the Reserve Bank of India put out a consultation paper asking whether, and how, peer-to-peer lending should be regulated in India. That single document told More there would soon be a legal way to build the business he wanted to build. He brought in Abhinandan Sangam, an engineer who would become the company’s CTO, and Vishwas Dixit, who had spent years as a National Sales Manager at TVS Motor Company and understood distribution outside the metros. Bridge Fintech Solutions Private Limited was incorporated in 2016, before there was even a licence to apply for. When the RBI finally issued its Master Directions for NBFC-P2P platforms in October 2017, Finzy was, by its own and press accounts, the first company to file an application under the new rules — a first-mover bet that the regulator would eventually say yes.

The struggle years

The regulator did say yes, but not quickly, and not without cost along the way. Finzy spent close to a year as an unlicensed applicant, burning cash and building a lending book on faith that the certificate would arrive, before the RBI granted its NBFC-P2P Certificate of Registration in July 2018 — making Finzy only the third platform in the country to be certified, after Faircent and OML Technologies. The certificate did not end the uncertainty. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic hit a business model that depends entirely on strangers trusting each other with money: according to a lender’s published account of the platform, roughly 35% of Finzy’s loan portfolio entered the RBI-mandated repayment moratorium between March and August 2020, straining the cash flow of a company that had until then kept reported defaults near zero. Then, years after the pandemic passed, the regulatory risk that had helped build Finzy came back to bite it. A Reserve Bank scrutiny in September 2023 found the platform had disbursed loans to borrowers without getting the specific approval of the individual lenders funding them, and had taken on partial credit risk — activities outside what an NBFC-P2P is allowed to do. That inspection would not be resolved for another year and a half.

The turning point

The single event that reset Finzy’s business arrived in two parts, eleven months apart, in the same regulatory cycle. In August 2024, the RBI rewrote the rulebook for the entire P2P industry: it banned platforms from offering any credit enhancement or default guarantee, forced a shift to a fixed, disclosed fee instead of returns-linked pricing, and mandated T+1 settlement through escrow accounts, stripping out the very features that had let weaker platforms dress up P2P lending as a low-risk product. Two months later, in October 2024, the RBI sent show-cause notices to six platforms for non-compliance with the new guidelines — Faircent, Monexo, Rang De, Financepeer, Lendbox and Finzy among them. On 4 March 2025, the RBI closed its own long-running case against Finzy specifically, imposing a ₹10 lakh penalty for the lender-consent and credit-risk violations first found in September 2023. Numbers on either side of that reset tell the rest of the story: in FY24, the year the scrutiny was unresolved and the old, riskier model still ran, Finzy’s revenue was ₹7.36 crore and its profit was not disclosed. In FY25, the year the fixed-fee, no-credit-risk model took hold industry-wide, revenue rose 87% to ₹13.8 crore and the company reported its first profit, ₹67.3 lakh. Forced compliance, in Finzy’s case, did not kill the business — it coincided with the best year the company has publicly reported.

The money behind it

Finzy has never raised the kind of capital that gets a startup called a unicorn, and that scale mismatch with better-funded rivals is itself part of its story. Disclosed fundraising, per Inc42 Datalabs and Tracxn, totals about $4.3 million (₹41 crore at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) across three identified rounds, with no priced valuation reliably reported since.

• Seed, first close — March 2018: $1.3 million, described in coverage as backed by senior BFSI professionals and entrepreneurs (Inc42, fintech.global).
• Seed, extended close — August 2018: An additional $1 million, taking the round to $2.3 million; used, per co-founder Vishwas Dixit’s statement at the time, to fund geographic expansion, technology and distribution ahead of an expected 3x jump in monthly disbursals (fintech.global, August 2018).
• Convertible note — November 2021: $2 million, the company’s most recent disclosed capital raise and its current funding stage per Inc42 Datalabs, as of September 2026.

Company databases attribute angel participation across these rounds to individuals including Mayank Soti, Sameer Narayan Navaratna and Nitin Kumar Bhandari (Tracxn); none of the primary press coverage of the rounds names individual backers or states what each investor specifically changed about the business, so that detail is not claimed here. No priced valuation for Finzy could be confirmed from a source reliable enough to print — aggregator estimates for the company conflicted with each other on both the amount and the date, so the figure is left out rather than guessed at.

How it makes money

Finzy’s revenue line is a fee, not interest income — it is the lenders, not the platform, who are owed the interest and who carry the risk of a borrower defaulting. The mechanics:

• Money in: a platform fee historically charged as 2% plus GST of the EMI that lenders receive on each loan they have funded, deducted before payout (per Finzy’s own published FAQ material); the August 2024 RBI directions have since pushed the whole sector toward a fixed, upfront disclosed fee rather than one tied to outcomes.
• Borrower pricing: loans are graded by an internal credit-risk bucket, from A1 at 10.99% p.a. to C6 at 27.99% p.a., so the same platform prices a salaried borrower with a clean credit history very differently from a thin-file applicant.
• Lender pricing: Finzy advertises indicative lender returns of up to 13% p.a. as of September 2026, achieved by pooling a lender’s money across many small loan fragments rather than one large exposure.
• Costs out: credit underwriting, collections and technology are the core cost lines for an NBFC-P2P; FY25 total expenses of ₹13.8 crore’s counterpart, ₹13.7 crore, rose only 5% year-on-year even as revenue rose 87%, which is what let the profit appear (Inc42 Datalabs).
• Where the margin sits: the platform’s margin is the spread between what it collects in fees and what it spends on acquiring, underwriting and servicing loans — not the interest rate spread itself, which passes through to lenders and borrowers.
• The part people get wrong: lenders on P2P platforms are often sold the product as a fixed-income alternative to a bank deposit; regulation now explicitly requires platforms to state that lenders bear the entire risk of principal or interest loss, with no guarantee or credit enhancement from the platform itself.

The numbers

Bridge Fintech Solutions’ standalone financials, drawn from statutory filings as aggregated by Inc42 Datalabs, Tofler and TheCompanyCheck, show a company that lost money for years before a sharp FY25 turn:

• FY23 → FY24: revenue rose about 79% year-on-year, from ₹4.1 crore to ₹7.36 crore (Inc42 Datalabs; TheCompanyCheck).
• FY24 → FY25: revenue rose a further 87–88% to ₹13.8 crore, while total expenses grew only 5% to ₹13.7 crore (Inc42 Datalabs).
• FY25 profitability: profit after tax of ₹67.3 lakh, a net profit margin of 4.9%, and estimated EBITDA of ₹2.2 crore (Inc42 Datalabs).
• Balance sheet: total assets of ₹9.5 crore in FY25, down 26% year-on-year; paid-up capital of ₹3.83 crore against authorised capital of ₹5.19 crore as of the FY24 filing (Tofler; TheCompanyCheck).

Where the money comes from

Finzy does not publish a formal geographic or channel revenue split, so the closest verifiable segment view is by loan purpose and by the credit-risk grade that decides pricing on both sides of the marketplace:

• By stated loan purpose: personal loans for debt consolidation, medical expenses, home improvement, education and wedding costs are the categories the company itself lists as use cases for borrowing.
• By credit grade (borrower side): six bands from A1 (10.99% p.a., lowest risk) through to C6 (27.99% p.a., highest risk), each grade carrying a different interest rate and, implicitly, a different share of platform revenue per rupee lent.
• By registered domicile: the operating company is registered in Mumbai (per its own legal footer and MCA filing) while Inc42 Datalabs lists Bengaluru, Karnataka as its current operating base — a split that is common for Indian fintechs incorporated in one city and run from another.
• The surprise: despite years of losses, Finzy’s FY25 expense base barely moved (up 5%) while revenue nearly doubled (up 87%) — the growth came from doing more of the same activity more efficiently under a tighter fee structure, not from a new product line or a new geography.

The risks

• Regulatory risk, already realised: the RBI fined Bridge Fintech Solutions ₹10 lakh on 4 March 2025 for disbursing loans without individual lender consent and for assuming partial credit risk; the company was also among six P2P platforms to receive an RBI show-cause notice in October 2024, and the RBI has stated the penalty does not preclude further action if warranted.
• Credit risk sits entirely with lenders, and it is rising sector-wide: India’s P2P lending industry’s bad loans more than doubled to ₹1,163 crore in FY24 from ₹472.1 crore in FY23, per RBI data reported by Business Standard; under the August 2024 directions, platforms including Finzy are explicitly barred from offering any credit enhancement or guarantee, so a borrower default is a lender’s loss alone.
• Impersonation and fraud: Finzy’s own FAQ page (accessed September 2026) carries a standing warning that people have posed as its employees or authorised representatives to defraud customers, and instructs users to verify any borrowing or lending opportunity directly with the company before sending money.

The takeaway

Finzy’s clearest lesson is an uncomfortable one for regulated fintechs: being first is not the same as being safe. Applying for a licence before anyone else got Finzy attention and an early NBFC-P2P certificate, but the aggressive product choices that came with growing fast on thin capital — disbursing before every lender had signed off, absorbing a slice of credit risk to make the product feel safer than it legally was — are the same choices that drew a regulator’s scrutiny six years later. The company’s FY25 turn suggests the opposite instinct also works: when the RBI forced the entire sector onto a plainer, fixed-fee, no-guarantee model in August 2024, Finzy’s costs barely moved and its revenue nearly doubled. For a marketplace business built on other people’s money, doing less — fewer shortcuts, a narrower and better-disclosed product — turned out to be more profitable than doing more.

Frequently asked questions

What does Finzy actually do?

Finzy runs an RBI-registered NBFC-P2P marketplace that connects individuals who want to lend money for a return with individuals who want a personal loan, charging a platform fee rather than lending its own capital.

Who founded Finzy and when?

Finzy was founded by Amit More, Abhinandan Sangam and Vishwas Dixit; the operating company, Bridge Fintech Solutions Private Limited, was incorporated in 2016, and Finzy received its RBI NBFC-P2P certificate in July 2018.

Has Finzy been profitable?

FY25 (year to March 2025) is the first year Finzy has publicly disclosed a profit, ₹67.3 lakh on revenue of ₹13.8 crore, following a loss of ₹8.8 crore in FY23.

Has Finzy faced any regulatory action?

Yes. The RBI imposed a ₹10 lakh penalty on Bridge Fintech Solutions on 4 March 2025 for disbursing loans without individual lender approval and for taking on partial credit risk, and the company was among six P2P platforms sent an RBI show-cause notice in October 2024.

What return can lenders expect on Finzy, and what risk do they take?

Finzy advertises indicative lender returns of up to 13% a year as of September 2026, but under current RBI rules the platform cannot offer any credit enhancement or guarantee, so lenders bear the full risk of a borrower’s default on principal or interest.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Reserve Bank of India, press release on penalty imposed on Bridge Fintech Solutions Private Limited (“Finzy”), March 2025 (rbi.org.in)
• TaxGuru, “RBI imposes monetary penalty on Bridge Fintech Solutions Private Limited (Finzy),” March 2025
• MediaNama, “RBI sends show cause notices to 6 P2P lending platforms,” October 2024
• Business Standard, “RBI flags breach of regulations by some NBFC-P2P lending platforms,” August 2024
• Business Standard, “Bad loans in P2P more than doubles to Rs 1,163 cr in FY24: Report,” December 2024
• Business Standard (ANI), “Finzy receives NBFC-P2P certification from RBI,” July 2018
• Inc42 Datalabs, Finzy company and financials profile, accessed September 2026 (inc42.com/company/finzy)
• TheCompanyCheck, Bridge Fintech Solutions Private Limited FY 2025 insights, accessed September 2026
• Tofler, Bridge Fintech Solutions Private Limited company financials, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, Finzy company and funding profile, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “P2P Lending Startup Finzy Raises $1.3 Mn In Pre-Series A Funding,” March 2018
• fintech.global, “P2P lending platform Finzy closes pre-Series A on $2.3m,” August 2018
• Random Dimes, “Finzy 2 Year Review – P2P Lending” (Covid-19 moratorium impact account), accessed September 2026
• Finzy (finzy.com), team page, FAQ page and lending/borrowing product pages, accessed September 2026

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