Raghav took a ₹15 lakh personal loan in June 2024 for his sister's wedding. The bank quoted ten point nine nine percent annual interest. The actual cost of the loan, after the bank's standard charges, was almost ₹47,000 higher than the principal-and-interest schedule suggested — a processing fee, a bundled credit-life insurance premium, GST on the processing fee, a documentation charge, and a credit-report fee. None of it appeared on the headline. All of it appeared, in 8-point font, in the sanction letter.
Aanya read the same sanction letter the next day and recognised every line. She had signed off on hundreds of them at her last bank. The fees were not anomalies. They were how the channel-partner economy was funded — banks paid agents 2 to 3.5 percent commission per file; the customer paid the agents back, one charge at a time, on the way in. The system worked. It just was not honest.
A weekend later, in a co-working space in Lower Parel, we sketched the unit economics on the back of a printed Ledger. The lender pays us a commission. We pay the customer's charges out of that commission. The agent takes seventy percent of what is left. We keep the rest. The customer pays only the EMI on the actual principal. We could not find a number that made it not work.
That sketch is the Karzero Ledger. The pledge below is the company.