Fibe filed its DRHP on June 29, 2026. Moneyview IPO received SEBI approval the same day. The digital lending IPO queue just added a third name...

EarlySalary launched in 2015 with one product. Salary advances for young professionals with thin credit files. No collateral, no long credit history, just a payslip and a bet that a salaried income behaves more predictably than most other kinds of income.

The company renamed itself Fibe as the product line grew. The underwriting logic underneath did not move.

As of FY26, the average Fibe customer is 31 years old, earns ₹37,083 a month, and takes a loan of ₹77,987. 90.71% carry a CIBIL score of 700 or above. This is not a subprime book dressed up in fintech language. It is a intentionally built one.

CARE Ratings, assessing EarlySalary Services Pvt Ltd, the NBFC subsidiary that books Fibe's loans, names "the scalable model of the company considering its focus on the salaried segment" as a rating strength.

Fibe now runs two verticals. Personal loans are 77.38% of Total AUM. Purpose Driven Financing (PDF), embedded credit at the point of purchase for education, healthcare, insurance, travel and rooftop solar, makes up the other 22.62%. PDF is distributed through 10,387+ merchant touch points: hospitals, universities, insurers, dermatology clinics among them.

The economics inside PDF are the part worth sitting with. 53.31% of Fibe's new customers in FY26 arrived at zero acquisition cost. PDF's share of new customer sourcing rose from 24.01% in FY24 to 47.49% in FY26. With PDF Fibe has taken a leaf out of older NBFC like Bajaj Finance’s experience that its a lower cost and better risk sourcing channel.

Fibe isn't buying growth anymore. It's embedding it at checkout.

AUM: ₹4,064.15 crore in FY24. ₹5,267.86 crore in FY25.
₹8,602.73 crore in FY26. A 45.49% CAGR.

Fibe's outstanding portfolio grew 85.71% by volume and 116.55% by value between FY24 and FY26. Across the same window, PSU bank portfolios in this ticket size shrank. NBFCs as a category grew 47.3% by volume, the closest comparison point, and Fibe outpaced even that.

On PAT: ₹101.2 crore, ₹113.7 crore, ₹290.8 crore. A 69.48% CAGR, the fastest of any lender in the DRHP's own comparison table.

One number separates Fibe's story from Moneyview's before either files another quarter. Interest income was already 61% of Fibe's revenue from operations in FY24. By FY26, that climbed to 64.6%. Fees and commission sit at 25% to 29%. Guarantee premium income adds another 7% to 9%.

Moneyview's DRHP told a fee to interest income transition story, a company moving from pure distribution toward owning the balance sheet. Why would Fibe need the same transition? It didn't. Fibe was interest income heavy from day one.

On the balance sheet, ₹5,241.20 crore of Total Gross Loans sit on Fibe's own books out of ₹8,602.73 crore in Total AUM. Roughly 61% on book. The remaining 39% runs through co-lending with 10 partner institutions.

Fibe didn't just evolve into an NBFC. It started as one.

Let us look at the CAGR split behind the portfolio split. Total AUM compounded at 45.49% between FY24 and FY26. PL alone compounded at 38.25%. PDF alone compounded at 82.99%, more than double the PL rate.

PDF is still the smaller book. It will not stay the smaller book at this pace. Every year Fibe doesn't deliberately slow it down, PDF claims a larger share of the AUM.

Meanwhile, Average PL ticket size rose 63.12% between FY24 and FY26, from ₹53,059 to ₹86,547. Tenure stretched from 11 months to 16. Neither of those numbers comes from acquiring new borrowers. They come from lending more, for longer, to people Fibe already knows.

That is the cross-sell case, and the DRHP backs it with a number. AUM tied to existing customers grew from ₹2,266.38 crore in FY24 to ₹3,899.39 crore in FY26, a 31.17% CAGR.

Cross-sell at growth of 31.17% is the slower half of the business. AUM tied to new customers, PL and PDF combined, grew from ₹1,797.77 crore to ₹4,703.35 crore over the same window, a 61.75% CAGR, roughly double.

Existing customers still make up a real share of the book, 45.33% of Total AUM in FY26. But that share is falling, down from 55.77% in FY24, because new customers and PDF are compounding faster than the repeat base can keep up with. While cross-sell is genuine at Fibe. It has achieved the rapid growth in the last two years through new customer acquisition. The cross-sell is yet to catch up with this new acquisition.

PDF is also doing something the PL book structurally cannot: bringing in borrowers the salaried screen was built to exclude. Education financing serves students and career changers mid-upskill, people with no salary slip to verify. Healthcare financing serves patients across a far wider age and income band than the median 31-year-old PL borrower, funding IVF, weight management, hair restoration and diagnostics as much as hospitalisation. Rooftop solar financing serves homeowners and small commercial operators in Tier II and Tier III cities, an asset-owning profile with little in common with a young renter taking a first personal loan. Travel and e-commerce checkout finance sit closest to the core PL customer, but even here, the loan is underwritten against the purchase, not just the payslip.

PDF is not Fibe applying its salaried thesis to new products. It is Fibe building a second underwriting model next to the first one, and quietly reaching customers the first model was designed to turn away.

Net interest margin, on Fibe's own book, was 17.38% in FY26. That is down from 20.85% in FY25 and 19.58% in FY24, even as the average cost of borrowing improved to 10.63% from 11.71% and 12.39% over the same two years. Funding got cheaper. The margin still compressed. That combination points to pricing or yield pressure on the loan book itself, not a funding problem, and it is the one figure in this DRHP that runs against the improvement narrative everywhere else.

Credit cost, impairment of financial instruments as a share of Average AUM, was 6.06% in FY26, down sharply from 9.99% in FY25 and 8.37% in FY24. Operating expenses, employee costs plus other expenses, ran at 7.21% of Average AUM in FY26, down from 8.61% and 8.69% the two years before. These rapid drop might also be attributed to the rapid AUM growth last year which the average AUM metric is unable to capture precisely.

Stack them: 17.38% net interest margin, minus 6.06% credit cost, minus 7.21% opex, leaves close to 4.11%. Fibe's disclosed Return on Average AUM for FY26 was 4.19%.

On a per-loan basis, FY26 operating expenses of ₹500.33 crore divided across 2,018,033 loans disbursed across the platform works out to roughly ₹2,480 in operating cost per loan. That figure blends PL and PDF together, Fibe does not disclose a vertical-specific cost split, so treat it as a directional estimate, not a precise per-product number.

A loan carrying a mid-teens net interest margin only clears a healthy return if the credit cost line stays near 6% and not the 10% it was at twelve months earlier.

Now the part the growth numbers alone can't tell you. Who is each of these four actually lending to?

Fibe screens for salaried, income verified young professionals earning around ₹37,083 a month.

Kissht runs a wider net. 67.65% of its borrowers earn between ₹25,000 and ₹75,000 a month, but the company frames its target as the mass market of young, digitally active credit seekers, not a salaried only segment. Its NBFC arm, Si Creva Capital Services, runs 34 underwriting sub models across occupation type, bureau depth and banking behaviour.

KreditBee has gone further still, in the opposite direction from Fibe. It serves non salaried borrowers, part timers, freelancers, the self employed, reading alternative data where a salary slip would normally sit. It has added secured lending, loans against property, small business loans and a UPI app on top. Where Fibe goes narrow, KreditBee is going wide. (Interestingly, Krazybee is also one of the colending partners of Fibe.)

Moneyview, covered in an earlier edition, is broader again. Tier II cities, ages 25 to 35, annual incomes from ₹3 lakh to ₹10 lakh. No salaried screen at all.

Of the four, only Fibe still focused on salaried only underwriting model at this scale. That narrowness is the actual point of difference, not the branding sitting on top of it.

Credit quality is where that bet gets tested. Fibe's Gross Stage 3 ratio moved from 1.95% to 2.90% to 1.20% across FY24 to FY26. The FY25 spike is real. It shouldn't get written out of the story just because FY26 recovered. 90+ day delinquency peaked at 2.50% in June 2024 and fell to 1.13% by March 2026, a trend Fibe credits to tighter underwriting and a shift toward higher score borrowers. Originations from customers with a CIBIL score above 731 rose from 76.46% in FY24 to 86.15% in FY26.

Fibe's above prime originations rose from 21.67% in FY24 to 33.09% in FY26, while below prime originations nearly halved, from 23.54% to 13.85%. Two different scoring methodologies, both showing the book skewing toward better credit.

For context, Kissht's own disclosed FY25 GNPA sits at 2.89%, close to Fibe's FY25 peak of 2.90%, despite Kissht's wider borrower base. One data point. Worth flagging. Not yet a trend.

Set against the rest of the peer table in FY26: Bajaj Finance at 1.01%, SBI Cards at 2.41%, Poonawalla at 1.44%, Kissht at 2.12%. Fibe's 1.20% sits comfortably in the middle, ahead of two of the three, behind only Bajaj Finance.

Here's the tension worth sitting with. New customers made up 29.23% of PL disbursement value in FY24. By FY26, that had risen to 38.53%. New customers carry no repayment history with Fibe. They are, by definition, the bigger unknown in the book.

The salaried screen is reducing risk today. It hasn't yet been tested through a full credit cycle at this level of new customer exposure.

One more piece of context, about sequencing, not pricing. Kissht filed its DRHP in August 2025, priced its IPO at ₹162 to ₹171, and listed on May 8, 2026, up 11.1% on debut. It is already trading. Moneyview filed in March 2026 and cleared SEBI on June 29, the same day Fibe filed, with its price band still to come. KreditBee hasn't filed at all. It closed a $280 million Series E round and is expected to file once that settles.

Rules on default loss guarantees, co-lending structures and customer protection sit over this entire sector. Fibe is not exempt from any of it.

New customer exposure is climbing. 38.53% of PL disbursement value in FY26 went to borrowers with no repayment history at Fibe, up from 29.23% two years earlier.

The book stays almost entirely unsecured. 99.39% of Total AUM as of FY26. Secured lending, mostly loans against mutual funds, is new and still just 0.61%.

The salaried screen doubles as a concentration. Fibe's own DRHP says plainly that repayment capacity depends on borrowers' employment stability and income levels. A downturn that hits salaried employment specifically, not credit conditions generally, would land harder on this book than on a more spread out one.

Ten co-lending partners, none above 10% of exposure, belongs on this list too. Growth lever and risk factor, same fact.

KreditBee's expansion into non salaried, alternative data lending isn't a threat to Fibe's existing book. It is a ceiling on how much of the market Fibe's model can ever reach. Different risk, same conversation as the growth question above.

Fibe is running the narrowest bet of the four lenders in this comparison. Salaried, income verified, young professionals, a segment it has never really left since its EarlySalary days.

The numbers back it for now. Fastest PAT growth in the peer set. RoAA back above 4% after a FY25 dip. Stage 3 loans back near FY24 levels. An independent rating agency credits the salaried focus itself as a source of scale, a genuine underwriting claim standing on its own.

The number to watch after listing is the new customer share of PL disbursements. If it keeps climbing past 40% while Stage 3 stays low, the salaried screen is doing exactly what it was built to do. If Stage 3 creeps back up as that share rises, the narrow bet was riskier than this DRHP makes it look today.

A narrower underwriting bet is not automatically a safer one. It is a different concentration risk wearing better credit scores.