By embedding cloud, data, and AI at the core of its business strategy, Piramal Finance is demonstrating how financial institutions can scale innovation without compromising governance or speed.
When Piramal Finance began shaping its digital transformation journey, technology was never positioned as a support function. Instead, it was elevated early on as a strategic pillar—on par with business, risk, and distribution. This foundational belief has guided how the company builds products, organises talent, and scales operations in one of the most regulated sectors of the economy.
“At Piramal Finance, technology and advanced analytics were established early as core strategic pillars of the business,” says Saurabh Mittal, Chief Technology Officer, Piramal Finance. That conviction translated into decisive early moves—from setting up a central innovation hub in Bengaluru to committing fully to a cloud-native architecture in 2021.
Cloud-native by design, not retrofit
Unlike legacy lenders burdened with incremental modernisation, Piramal Finance chose to go cloud-native from day one. This decision enabled the company to design a unified digital architecture capable of supporting branch-led distribution, direct-to-consumer journeys, and embedded finance partnerships—all on the same foundational stack.
Today, this cloud-native platform supports over five million customers and manages more than US$ 7 billion in assets under management. Success is measured not just in scale, but in system availability, deployment velocity, cost-to-serve, and resilience during peak demand—metrics that matter when digital platforms become business-critical.
Data as the operating backbone
A critical enabler of Piramal Finance’s execution has been its enterprise data platform. The company built a unified data lake and warehouse to serve as a single source of truth across sourcing, credit, servicing, and collections.
Rather than allowing data, decisioning, and digital journeys to evolve in silos, the platform ensures they move together. “Real-time dashboards and analytics are now central to how business, risk, and operations teams work—anchoring decisions in shared, governed insights,” explains Mittal.
This data-first approach has also laid the groundwork for scaling machine learning across the lending lifecycle.
Embedding intelligence into every journey
Machine learning and AI are not layered on top of processes at Piramal Finance, but embedded directly into them. Models power sourcing, underwriting, fraud detection, early warning systems, and collections optimisation, augmenting human decision-making rather than replacing it.
The impact is measured through tangible outcomes: improved approval and conversion rates, better recovery efficiency, reduced fraud, and lower operating expenses. Workflow automation further complements these gains by reducing manual intervention and compressing turnaround times across lending operations.
“Together, cloud, data, AI, and automation form an integrated technology stack that links scale, intelligence, and execution excellence,” points out Mittal.
Governance as a growth enabler
In a highly regulated industry, Piramal Finance has taken a clear stance: governance is not a brake on innovation—it is what allows innovation to scale safely.
Security, compliance, and auditability are built into the cloud platform by design. Change management relies on mechanisms such as canary deployments, allowing new releases to be tested on limited traffic before wider rollout. Regulatory and security checks are automated within engineering pipelines, enforcing compliance without slowing teams down.
For data and AI, strong governance frameworks cover lineage, access controls, privacy, and model explainability, with continuous monitoring post-deployment. Close collaboration between technology, risk, compliance, and business teams ensures regulatory alignment from the outset.
Turning platforms into revenue engines
The business impact of this digital foundation is visible across revenue, experience, and efficiency. Piramal Finance’s D2C platform has become a powerful cross-sell and up-sell engine, increasing customer lifetime value through embedded intelligence.
Its Lending-as-a-Service platform, Mudra, has unlocked embedded finance as a scalable revenue stream by exposing core lending capabilities via secure APIs—allowing partners to go live in weeks, not months.
On the experience front, tools like Sales Central enable relationship managers to complete end-to-end onboarding and disbursement at the customer’s doorstep, while mobile self-service apps reduce friction for digitally inclined customers.
The shift to AI-native
Looking ahead, Piramal Finance’s ambition is to evolve from a digital-native lender into a deeply AI-native organisation. Generative AI and agentic AI are already being deployed across document intelligence, voice-based customer engagement, and operations.
Enterprise AI assistants and everyday AI tools are enhancing productivity by surfacing insights in natural language and enabling non-technical users to build dashboards and applications. Over time, AI agents will increasingly orchestrate end-to-end workflows—supporting underwriters, relationship managers, and operations teams within clearly defined guardrails.
“Our goal is to embed intelligence into every journey, every decision, and every layer of the organisation,” says Mittal.
In doing so, Piramal Finance offers a blueprint for financial institutions seeking not just digital transformation, but durable, AI-led growth at scale.