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Lending 101 Vol. I · Four Modules Now Publishing

How Lending Businesses Actually Work.

A comprehensive, operator-led deconstruction of credit strategy, economic math, and the counterintuitive realities of building and scaling lending products in India.

By Aditi Gupta  ·  Bengaluru  ·  Free to Read

Series Overview

What This Is

Written with the operator's ground-level perspective and the allocator's top-down lens.

Lending 101 is a series of working modules on the credit business — not the textbook version, but the real one: the economics, the operational bottlenecks, the counterintuitive trade-offs, and the structural patterns that separate lending businesses that compound from those that don't.

Each module is a self-contained unit — digestible on its own, but sequenced to build a complete mental model of how credit products are built, priced, operated, and scaled. The focus is India, but the logic travels.

Written across three lenses: fifteen years in financial services as an analyst at HSBC and Credit Suisse, an investor at Stellaris Venture Partners, and an operator building Debitum Cube.

The Modules

01
Module 1 Live Now

The Economics of a Lending Business

ROA tree · Valley of Death · Capital structure · LSP vs. NBFC

Deconstructing the ROA tree from first principles — how spread, opex, and credit costs interact to determine viability. The "Valley of Death" in minimum viable scale, and the capital structure leverage choices that define the LSP vs. NBFC trade-off.

Read Module 1

Module Details

Status
Live
Key Concepts
ROA decomposition, unit economics, minimum scale, capital leverage
Lens
Operator + Allocator
02
Module 2 Forthcoming

The Three Pillars

Sourcing bias · Approval vs. NPA · Collections

The three operational levers that determine whether a lending business survives — and how optimising for any one in isolation can quietly destroy the others.

Coming Next

Module Details

Status
Forthcoming
Key Concepts
Sourcing quality, approval bias, collection efficiency
Lens
Operator
03
Module 3 Forthcoming

Building New Categories & Finding Alpha

Category creation · Structural advantage · Moat construction

How lending businesses create durable competitive advantages — the structural moats that compound versus the tactical edges that erode.

Coming Soon

Module Details

Status
Forthcoming
Key Concepts
Category creation, moat design, structural alpha
Lens
Allocator + Operator
04
Module 4 Forthcoming

Portfolio Monitoring & The Devil in the Detail

Roll rates · Seasoning curves · Business finance

The signals that tell you a portfolio is breaking before the headline numbers do — roll rates, seasoning curves, vintage analysis, and the business finance discipline that keeps operators honest.

Coming Soon

Module Details

Status
Forthcoming
Key Concepts
Roll rates, vintage analysis, seasoning, portfolio health
Lens
Operator

Who This Is For

Operators

Building or scaling lending products who want the economic logic made explicit — not the textbook version, but the actual mechanics.

Allocators

Investing in credit businesses who want to stress-test the unit economics and capital structure assumptions they're being pitched.

Builders

Engineers, product managers, and analysts who want to understand the full system — not just the slice they're building inside of.

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