Kissht IPO Lists 11% Higher, Putting Digital Lenders on Market Map

An app on your phone just went public, and how it trades over the next few weeks will tell every venture-backed lender in India whether their path to the stock market is open or closed.

OnEMI Technology Limited, which runs the digital lending app Kissht, listed on the National Stock Exchange on Friday at ₹190 per share. That is an 11.1% jump over its issue price of ₹171. For investors who got the allotment, that is a clean ₹19 gain per share before the market even opened for trading. Not a blockbuster debut, but more than decent for a category that public markets have barely seen before.

The listing matters beyond that first-day pop. Kissht is something genuinely new in the listed space: a pure-play, app-first consumer lender that serves salaried and self-employed borrowers who struggle to get credit through traditional banks. Unlike Bajaj Finance, which has decades of history and a massive balance sheet, or Paytm, which markets itself as a financial super app, Kissht does one thing. It lends money, through a phone, to people who need it in small amounts, fast.

Who is this company actually serving?

Think about a junior accounts executive in Jaipur, three years into her first job, salary decent enough, but no home loan yet, no credit card history, thin records with the credit bureau. She needs ₹30,000 for a medical emergency or a laptop upgrade. A traditional bank will likely turn her away. Kissht will not.

The company and its backers describe this customer as “neo-prime.” Not subprime, they are careful to clarify. These are not borrowers with bad credit. They are borrowers with almost no credit history, simply because India’s formal credit system has historically been slow to include first-generation earners. Digital lenders like Kissht built technology specifically to assess these borrowers differently, using alternative data signals and faster underwriting rather than waiting for a bureau score that takes years to build.

This segment has grown explosively. Digital non-banking finance companies now account for 78% of all personal loans sanctioned by volume in India. By count, that is 99 million loans worth ₹1.53 trillion in just the first nine months of the current financial year. By value, digital NBFCs still lag, handling only 19% of the total. But the direction of travel is unmistakable.

The pivot that hurt, then helped

Kissht’s path to this listing was not smooth. The company made a deliberate and painful strategic shift over the past two years. It moved away from very short-duration, small-ticket loans toward longer-tenor, higher-ticket products, including launching loans against property.

The numbers on that transition are stark. Average loan tenor jumped from 2.92 months in the 2024 financial year to 9.65 months in 2025. Average ticket size nearly doubled from ₹14,721 to ₹31,808. Longer loans, bigger amounts, better customers.

But to get there, the company essentially hit pause on growth. Total disbursements fell from ₹18,531 crore to ₹9,858 crore, nearly halved. Revenue dropped from ₹1,700 crore to ₹1,353 crore. Profit after tax fell from ₹197 crore to ₹161 crore. On paper, the business appeared to be shrinking.

It was not shrinking. It was rebuilding its portfolio from scratch, accepting short-term pain to come out the other side with a cleaner book. That bet appears to have paid off. In the nine months ending December 2025, profit after tax reached ₹199 crore, already ahead of the full 2025 financial year figure. Total assets under management climbed from ₹1,268 crore in the 2023 financial year to ₹5,956 crore by December 2025. Return on equity hit an annualised 23.51%.

The risk quality numbers are where Kissht makes its sharpest argument to investors. Net non-performing assets stood at 0.31% as of December 2025. Among comparable digital lenders, KreditBee reported 0.65% and Fibe reported 0.89% at similar periods. In a sector that has faced regulatory scrutiny over reckless lending and deteriorating asset quality, a sub-0.35% net NPA figure is genuinely unusual. It helped that Crisil upgraded Kissht’s credit rating from BBB+ to A- between the draft and final versions of its prospectus. Rating agencies rarely upgrade a company mid-listing process. That upgrade is external validation that the portfolio clean-up worked.

What public investors are really being asked to judge

Chief executive Ranvir Singh laid out Kissht’s competitive argument in three parts: its ability to discriminate between good and risky borrowers, a diversified sourcing model where digital marketing contributes less than half of customer acquisition, and a base of 11.2 million customers it can sell more products to.

The secured lending push, particularly loan against property, is described as a major strategic priority rather than a tactical side step. That signals the company wants to lower its cost of funds over time. When you prove consistent risk performance to lenders and rating agencies, they charge you less to borrow. When you borrow cheaper, your margins improve even if loan volumes stay flat.

Singh has been candid about the limits. “I don’t have the benefit of vintage,” he told investors, acknowledging that Kissht’s ₹5,900 crore AUM sits well below KreditBee’s ₹11,875 crore. It remains a smaller player in a sector where scale brings bargaining power on both ends, sourcing depositors and pricing loans.

What this means beyond the listing day

For retail investors watching from the sidelines, the Kissht listing is an early read on how the market prices a new kind of financial company. The established NBFCs trade at valuations built on decades of performance data. The question this listing poses is simple: how much of a discount should a younger, tech-led, faster-growing lender trade at relative to those giants?

For ordinary borrowers, the broader trend matters more. The surge in digital lending has meaningfully opened credit access for people who were invisible to formal finance ten years ago. Whether that access is responsibly priced and sustainably funded depends on whether these companies can maintain the risk discipline Kissht is currently claiming.

A listing is not proof of sustainability. It is an invitation to watch closely. The next few quarterly results will tell a more honest story than the first trading day ever could.