Kissht’s rapid rise: Can its business justify the valuation?
Kissht is up 86% in three months since listing. A 61% growth rate, 5% RoAA and a 2.1% GNPA, but credit costs remain above 8%. At 2.4x book, what exactly are investors paying for?
Kissht's proposition is simple: speed. Once customers download the app and complete digital KYC, loans are typically credited to their bank accounts within five to ten minutes. (File photo) Kissht lends personal loans to young borrowers through a mobile app, charging interest rates of around 30%. In FY26, it reported a profit of Rs 281 crore, an unusual achievement in India’s digital lending industry, where many fintech lenders have struggled to build sustainable businesses.
Investors have rewarded that performance. Shares of parent OnEMI Technology Solutions have risen 86% since listing in May 2026, trading at Rs 318 per share by late July.
Kissht share price since listing
Source: http://www.tradingview.com
Yet the numbers invite closer scrutiny. How does a lender making average loans of just Rs 37,000 generate such high profits? Are reported bad-loan levels sustainable? And after the stock’s sharp rally, how much of that optimism is already reflected in the valuation?
The business: small loans, big volumes
Kissht’s proposition is simple: speed. Once customers download the app and complete digital KYC, loans are typically credited to their bank accounts within five to ten minutes.
The average loan size is around Rs 37,000 with a repayment tenure of roughly 17 months. The typical borrower is 32 years old and has a median CIBIL score of 746.
These loans sit within Si Creva Capital, the group’s wholly owned NBFC. Two years ago, the company also entered secured lending through Loan Against Property (LAP), a business that now spans 101 branches and accounts for 7.7% of assets under management (AUM).
According to TransUnion CIBIL’s FinTech Compass, fintech lenders account for 86% of all personal loans below Rs 50,000 by volume. Because these loans are small, however, they represent only about 1% of India’s overall retail credit balances. As of March 2026, the segment had grown to Rs 1.77 lakh crore across 27.9 million live borrowers, reflecting 31% growth year-on-year.
Demand is not the challenge. The real test is underwriting small-ticket unsecured loans profitably. Across the industry, 5.4% of such loans turned 30 days past due within six months of disbursement during FY25.
Performance, however, varies sharply across borrower segments. Existing borrowers generally perform better than first-time credit users, while delinquency rates also differ significantly across customer personas identified by TransUnion CIBIL.
30 DPD delinquency at 6 months
Source: TransUnion CIBIL Fintech Compass July 2026
Source: TransUnion CIBIL Fintech Compass July 2026
Kissht says it manages this risk through two levers.
The first is underwriting. Management says its machine-learning models analyse more than 7,000 variables spanning bureau records, banking and device data, allowing them to distinguish good borrowers around 2.5 times better than conventional bureau scores.
The second is collections. More than 95% of the company’s collections network is in-house, comprising over 7,000 field agents and 1,000 tele-callers who begin recovery efforts as early as five days after a payment is missed.
The financials, summarised (Rs crore)
Source: Company KPI handbook (Q1 FY27), consolidated AUM includes on-book and off-book loans
Assets: what the loan book looks like
Of Kissht’s Rs 8,001 crore AUM, about 92% consists of unsecured personal loans. Loan Against Property accounts for the remaining 7.7%, but that share has been rising rapidly.
AUM mix
Source: Onemi Technologies Ltd Q1FY27 Investor Presentation
The chart above highlights two trends.
First, the secured portfolio has expanded sharply. LAP accounted for just 2.5% of AUM a year earlier and is 7.7% now, even as personal loans grew over 50%.
Second, the funding split: 53.6% of the book now sits off-book, where partner banks and NBFCs put up the money, and Kissht originates, underwrites and collects, keeping the gap between what the borrower pays and the partner’s agreed return as fee income. It is a capital-light way to grow, though not risk-free, since Kissht still guarantees the first 5% of losses.
During the Q4FY26 earnings call, management said that roughly 45% of its customers now have another personal loan elsewhere, typically of a larger size. At the same time, the share of AUM from repeat customers has fallen from 73% to 51% in five quarters. This means that the recent book skews toward newer, less-tested borrowers.
Share of AUM, by product, funding source and customer type
Source: Company KPI handbook, AUM Profile tab
Liabilities: who funds it, and at what price
About 46% of Kissht’s AUM sits on its own balance sheet, funded largely through debentures and term loans at an average borrowing cost of 14.5%. The remaining 54% is funded by more than 45 partner banks and NBFCs through co-lending and other off-balance-sheet arrangements.
Across most of these partnerships, Kissht provides a First Loss Default Guarantee (FLDG) of up to 5%, meaning it absorbs the initial losses if borrowers default.
The key lever to watch, however, is the credit rating. February’s upgrade to A- has already cut the cost of fresh borrowings by about 200 basis points, and each further upgrade makes the same machine cheaper to run.
So the engine is real. The next question is whether the loan book underneath it is as clean as the headline suggests.
Asset quality: read the credit cost, not the GNPA
On the face of it, the numbers are improving annually.
Source: Company KPI handbook. Quarterly credit cost annualised
However, in the June 2026 quarter there seems to be a deterioration in the 30-days-past-due (30 DPD) bucket. Whether this is temporary or underlines a deterioration trend will become clearer over the next few quarters.
There’s another observation that the company-reported KPI sheet doesn’t show, but the DHRP document does. GNPA increased from 0.05% to 2.1% between FY23 and FY26.
During the FY26 earnings call, management attributed part of that increase to a “technicality”. Earlier, loans were written off after 120 days of delinquency; they are now written off after 150 days.
Furthermore, even at 2.1%, GNPA appears low partly because bad loans exit the book quickly. The honest measure of risk here is the credit cost line. Impairment consumed 9.8% of average AUM in FY25, 8.2% in FY26, and about 7% in the March quarter. That is the real price of lending to this segment, and why the portfolio has to yield 32%.
The good news is the direction. Management guided credit costs down another 10-15% this year, cut disbursements 7% and paused lending across roughly 450 pin codes where early-warning signals flashed.
The key question is: If nearly a third of every loan comes back as interest and 7-8% of the book burns away each year as impairment, how does that still produce one of India’s more profitable fintechs?
Profitability: a 5% ROA machine
Let’s map out Rs 100 of Kissht’s loan book through Q1 FY27.
It earned about Rs 36 in income, paid Rs 4 on borrowings, spent Rs 18 running the machine (Opex), and lost about Rs 7 to bad loans. After tax, roughly Rs 5 remains.
That translates into a Return on Average Assets (RoAA) of around 5%, a level that compares favourably with most consumer-finance companies.
In F25, the Return on Equity (ROE) was above 20%, while FY26 ROE was 24%.
So why did ROE fall to 21.2% in the June quarter? The denominator changed. The IPO added Rs 850 crore of fresh equity, net worth jumped 67% in a single quarter to Rs 2,245 crore, and leverage collapsed.
This means on-book debt-to-equity is now just 0.91x and the subsidiary’s capital adequacy is above 40%. Management said steady state is 2.5 to 3x debt-to-equity, so as the IPO money converts into loans, theoretically ROEs should improve.
Profitability and capital
Source: Company KPI handbook. Quarterly ratios annualised. Red marks the post-IPO leverage collapse that is temporarily suppressing RoAE.
However, management said that FY27 guidance for RoAA is 4.5-5% and an ROE of 19-21%.
Why is the guidance down? Because Kissht is deliberately cutting yields, roughly 50-75 basis points a quarter, to chase safer borrowers, and because LAP is below breakeven and will drag for a year or two. The re-levering thesis also assumes credit stays clean while yields fall.
Which finally leaves us with a key question: What is the market asking you to pay for all this? And is it fair, undervalued or overvalued?
Valuation
At Rs 318, Kissht (Onemi Technology Solutions Ltd) is worth about Rs 5,345 crore. That is roughly 19 times FY26 earnings, 17 times trailing earnings, and about 2.4 times June 2026 book value.
Listed peers, and where the rest stand
Source: http://www.screener.in, company filings
Two notes on that table. First, Kissht’s real peers are mostly not listed: KreditBee raised $280 million in April 2026 ahead of a planned IPO, while Fibe, Moneyview and Navi remain private. Kissht is effectively the first scaled digital personal-loan lender on the mainboard.
Second, the two that are listed make Kissht look reasonable. SBI Cards, the nearest economic cousin (unsecured consumer credit with a similar engine), trades at 33 times earnings on a 15% ROE. And Aye Finance, a micro-enterprise lender that listed in February 2026, runs a nearly identical AUM but earned Rs 194 crore in FY26 against Kissht’s Rs 281 crore, with 4.8% GNPA and 9.3% ROE. Aye Finance still commands 1.62 times book value.
Kissht probably deserves its premium over Aye given its higher ROE and higher growth. The judgment call is how big a discount to SBI Cards an unseasoned, three-month-old listed fintech deserves.
The re-rating case is really an earnings case. If Kissht grows AUM 40%, re-levers toward 2.5-3x and holds ROA near 5%, ROE returns to 19%-21%, the current multiple is justified.
If credit costs stop falling, both the earnings and the multiple go the other way, and a stock that doubled in three months can un-double just as fast. Lock-in expiries will add supply over the coming months.
Note: We have relied on data from http://www.screener.in and http://www.tijorifinance.com throughout this article. Market price and market capitalisation data are from Thurro. Only in cases where the data was not available, have we used an alternate, but widely used and accepted source of information.
Rahul Rao has helped conduct financial literacy programmes for over 1,50,000 investors. He has also worked at an AIF, focusing on small and mid-cap opportunities.
Disclosure: The writer or his dependents do not hold shares in the securities/stocks/bonds discussed in the article.
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