The onboarding flow accelerated. The intelligence behind it did not
Indian financial institutions have digitised onboarding at scale. A loan application that previously required days now completes in minutes. An account opening that necessitated a branch visit now happens on a mobile device. That speed is no longer a differentiator; it is a competitive requirement.
The decisioning layer behind that speed has not kept pace. The same KYC, bureau and liveness checks that powered branch-era onboarding now sit behind digital-first flows — processing higher volumes, at greater speed, with fewer human touchpoints, and identical structural blind spots. A genuine applicant and a synthetic identity receive exactly the same verification checks. The difference between them lives in signals those checks were never designed to capture.