Innovation at PayMe is built on foundation of ethical AI: Mahesh Shukla

Founded in 2016, PayMe is the country's promising new FinTech establishment, offering a pool of comprehensive financial services for individuals and corporates. With a seed capital of USD 2 million, the company was rated among the top 30 emerging FinTech start-ups by INC 42.

Mahesh Shukla, Founder and CEO, PayMe, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview: 

DQ: How would you summarise PayMe’s business model and target customer segments?

Mahesh Shukla: PayMe is a tech-first NBFC that was built to solve one simple problem -- making credit fair, fast, and transparent for everyone, especially those who are often ignored by traditional banks.

Our business model revolves around responsible and inclusive lending -- providing short-term personal loans, salary advances, and credit solutions for both salaried and self-employed individuals. 

Our customers are often people with potential, but limited access to formal credit – blue-collar workers, young earners, freelancers, and small business owners from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

DQ: What growth levers would you prioritize for PayMe over the next 12-24 months?

Mahesh Shukla: For the next phase, we’re focusing on three big moves.

• Product diversification: Expanding beyond personal loans into small business loans, insurance, and loans against property.

• Technology enhancement: Deepening the use of AI and machine learning in underwriting to improve risk assessment and customer experience.

• Strategic partnerships: Strengthening collaborations with banks, NBFCs, and ecosystem players to scale lending capacity and distribution.

We’re also exploring geographic expansion into new regions while continuing to serve our strong customer base across northern and central India.

DQ: How would PayMe ensure compliance with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidelines regarding digital lending platforms?

Mahesh Shukla: Compliance is non-negotiable for us. PayMe operates as an RBI-registered NBFC, which means every aspect of our operations -- from loan disbursal to data handling -- strictly adheres to regulatory norms.

We also have a dedicated compliance team in-house that monitors each process — from how customer data is managed to how communication is shared on digital platforms. Every lending, marketing, and operational decision passes through a regulatory compliance filter to ensure transparency, fairness, and accountability.

Our philosophy is simple: innovation means nothing if it’s not built on trust. So, while we love experimenting with new technology, we ensure that every product is fully aligned with RBI’s digital lending framework.

DQ: PayMe claims to serve “self-employed” customers. Self-employed incomes are often irregular. How would you preprocess or normalise such income data and build features for a credit-scoring model?

Mahesh Shukla: That’s one of the most interesting parts of our work and that reflects a real-world challenge in digital lending.

At PayMe, we go beyond conventional salary slips or IT returns. Our credit model analyses multi-source income indicators, such as:

• Bank transaction patterns (credit inflows, spending behaviour, seasonality)
• Digital payment histories (UPI, wallet usage, vendor payments)
• Business metadata, such as customer inflow, reviews, and GST data available

By combining all of this through our AI-based underwriting engine, we create a more holistic credit profile that reflects true earning and repayment capacity. It’s not just about approving or rejecting loans it’s about helping self-employed customers build a stronger financial identity in the formal ecosystem.

DQ: What regulatory challenges does a fintech lending platform in India face? How would you ensure PayMe remains compliant while still innovating?

Mahesh Shukla: The fintech space in India is evolving every month, and with that come new expectations — especially around data privacy, fair lending, and transparency.

We’ve learned that the best way to deal with regulatory change is to stay ahead of it. Our compliance and legal teams work closely with policy experts to interpret new norms early and integrate them smoothly.

Innovation at PayMe is built on a foundation of ethical AI -- ensuring data transparency, explain-ability, and accountability at every level. That’s how we balance speed with responsibility.

DQ: PayMe advertises “instant approval”, “no documentation”, and digital end-to-end workflows. What are the trade-offs (both on the user side and the lender side) of such positioning?

Mahesh Shukla: Speed is important -- but responsible speed is what truly matters. For users, instant approvals mean less paperwork and faster access to funds, which is especially valuable in emergencies. 

On our end, it means building a strong backend, digital KYC, verified data integrations, and real-time fraud checks so that while the user experience is seamless, the process is still completely secure.

The balance is delicate -- we don’t want convenience to come at the cost of diligence. That’s why we’ve designed our system to make compliance invisible and experience effortless. At the end of the day, technology should make finance simpler, not riskier.