Snapmint and the instalment plan without a card

Most Indians cannot split a purchase on a credit card. Snapmint rebuilt the instalment plan on India's payment rails. Here is how it fits together.

Thesis: Snapmint turns a bank account on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) into a card-style Equated Monthly Instalment (EMI) plan by doing a card issuer’s three jobs (identity, underwriting and collection) and by getting the merchant to pay the interest.

Start from zero

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) in India starts with a missing card. In July 2026, TransUnion CIBIL (Credit Information Bureau India Limited) said 5.2 crore Indians hold a credit card: a quarter of the roughly 25 crore people with any credit record, in a country of about 147 crore. (A crore is 10 million.) No card means no card EMI. UPI reaches far wider, at more than 24 billion payments a month.

To finance a ₹9,000 purchase for someone with no card, a lender needs five things.

Identity: a Permanent Account Number (PAN), an Aadhaar-based check, and a phone number verified by One-Time Password (OTP).
Underwriting for thin or empty credit files: start small, let good behaviour raise the limit.
A merchant paid in full, fast. No brand adds a checkout option that pays it over nine months.
Collection that pulls rather than asks. Small loans to millions only work if repayment is automatic.
A regulated balance sheet, inside the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) rules on digital lending.

For a zero-cost EMI, one more: someone other than the shopper pays the interest.

The primitives

A credit limit, not a card. Each user sees an Approved Limit and an Available Limit. Snapmint’s help pages name the bureau score and repayment history among the key inputs, and say it also lends to people with no prior credit history.

The down payment. Zero-Cost EMI usually takes 25% or 33% upfront, Pay in 3 takes a third, and some shoppers qualify for zero down. The down payment shrinks the loan, tests intent, and turns a cash on delivery (COD) order into a prepaid one.

Plans and EMI on UPI. Merchants offer 3, 6 or 9 months as No Cost EMI or Low Cost EMI; Snapmint’s own store goes to 12. The down payment is a UPI payment, often made by scanning a Quick Response (QR) code. EMIs are pulled on the 3rd or 10th of the month by UPI AutoPay, which notifies the shopper at least 24 hours ahead, or by an electronic National Automated Clearing House (e-NACH) mandate.

Bureau reporting. Snapmint reports to all four Indian credit bureaus every fortnight, inside one drawdown loan account that stays open for four months after the last EMI. For a new-to-credit shopper, the hidden product is a credit history.

The merchant layer. Integrations with Shopify, Magento and Salesforce, plus checkouts and gateways such as Razorpay, Cashfree, GoKwik and Shopflo. Merchants get the full amount two days after the sale (T+2), whatever the plan, and Snapmint says it carries all customer fraud risk.

The lender. Snapmint Financial Services Private Limited is an RBI-registered Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC) making consumer loans of up to ₹5 lakh over 1 to 12 months. Snapmint also offers a Credit Line on UPI with Suryoday Small Finance Bank, and is itself a Third Party Application Provider (TPAP) on UPI through Yes Bank, with a Scan and Pay feature.

The rules. Under the RBI’s Digital Lending Directions of May 2025, a loan goes into the borrower’s account or, for a specific end use, straight to the end beneficiary, and repayments go directly to the lender with no pool account in between. The borrower sees a Key Facts Statement (KFS) with the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) before signing, and can exit during a cooling-off period, at least three days at Snapmint’s NBFC. Deferred-payment credit on merchant platforms must be reported to the bureaus.

Then there is the First Loss Default Guarantee (FLDG), now called a Default Loss Guarantee (DLG). A fintech acting only as a bank’s Lending Service Provider (LSP) can absorb first losses up to 5% of the amount disbursed, held as cash, a lien-marked fixed deposit or a bank guarantee, and the lender must invoke it within 120 days of a loan falling overdue. To carry all the risk and earn all the spread, you need your own NBFC. Snapmint has one.

Follow one payment

A ₹9,000 order on a brand’s Shopify store, paid with Pay in 3 at zero cost:

The shopper picks Snapmint at checkout and enters a mobile number and OTP.
Snapmint checks identity and, with consent, the bureau, then offers ₹3,000 now and ₹3,000 in each of the next two months, with a KFS showing the principal, zero interest and any fee.
The shopper pays the ₹3,000 down payment by UPI.
The shopper approves a UPI AutoPay mandate once, with their UPI Personal Identification Number (PIN).
Snapmint settles the brand for the full ₹9,000 within two days.
The EMIs typically begin once the brand dispatches the order. After each pre-debit notice, AutoPay pulls ₹3,000 on the 3rd or 10th of the month.
Each payment reaches the bureaus in the next fortnightly update. A missed EMI draws overdue interest of up to 0.1% a day after a three-day grace period, plus a penal charge of ₹30 or 5% of the bounced EMI’s principal, capped at ₹750.
If the product is returned and the brand accepts it, the loan closes and Snapmint refunds the down payment and any EMIs paid.

Where the money is

If the shopper pays no interest, the merchant does. Co-founder Abhineet Sawa said in 2023 that “Snapmint charges its merchants who subsidize the customer’s needs”, and that 80% of customers took no-cost EMIs, which earned Snapmint nothing from the shopper.

How large is that subsidy? Snapmint does not publish merchant rates, so here is an illustration with an assumed cost of money:

Pay in 3 on a ₹9,000 order	Amount
Down payment, one third	₹3,000
Financed	₹6,000
Average balance over two months	₹4,500
Carrying cost at an assumed 24% a year	₹180
As a share of the order	2%

Two percent sits inside what Indian merchants already pay to accept credit cards, roughly 1.5% to 2.5%. The brand pays card-like fees for a shopper with no card and gets a prepaid order instead of a COD one; Snapmint claims fewer than 2% of its orders return to origin.

Shoppers add smaller lines: interest on Low Cost EMI, processing fees of 0% to 5% (or up to ₹1,500) plus Goods and Services Tax (GST), late charges, and personal loans of ₹5,000 to ₹50,000 for repeat users.

In October 2025 Snapmint raised a $125 million Series B led by General Atlantic, reporting 7 million monthly active users across 23,000 postal codes and 1.5 million purchases a month. Its business site lists 2,000+ merchants and ₹5,500 crore+ of gross merchandise value (GMV) on EMI. Entrackr reported revenue from operations of ₹158.5 crore for the year to March 2025, up from ₹88.5 crore, and a return to profit.

What is hard, and what I would build next

The hard parts are what card networks solved for banks decades ago: telling a thin file from a fraudster, collecting on time from millions, and staying inside rules that cap a partner’s risk.

1. Price risk with the down payment. Airline revenue management rarely changes the seat; it changes the fare and the fences around it, such as advance purchase or no refunds. Snapmint’s fence is the down payment, which today comes in a few fixed sizes. I would set it per shopper, merchant and product so expected loss per order stays flat, and let brands pay to lower it for customers they want. Track conversion and 30-day delinquency by band.

2. Brand-funded zero-cost EMI on any QR code. A credit line on UPI can, by design, be spent at a shop counter, not only inside an integrated checkout. But at an unconnected merchant’s QR code, no brand has signed up to pay for a zero-cost plan. Let brands fund zero-cost windows on their own store QR codes, and the merchant-pays model travels offline.

3. Collect before the due date. A failed auto-debit can mean a bounce fee, a late charge and a bureau mark, hurting the shopper Snapmint wants to graduate. A pay-early nudge timed to each shopper’s income, rewarded with a higher limit, turns collections into retention.