Mintoak CEO: QR Payments Are Just the Start for MSMEs
12 Jul 2026
The QR code was never the destination
Speaking at MSME Sparks 2026, a virtual event that ran from June 22–25 with a grand finale on June 26, Mintoak Co-founder and CEO Raman Khanduja delivered a pointed message to India's fintech ecosystem: don't mistake the country's QR payment rollout for a finished job.
"My worry is we're celebrating the beginning of the story as if it's the end," Khanduja said, according to the report from the event.
Mintoak's platform processes around 400 million transactions every month and powers merchant payment infrastructure for HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, SBI Payments, and banks across Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. That scale gives the company a front-row view of a problem Khanduja says digital payments alone haven't solved: MSME access to formal credit.
Why MSMEs still can't get loans
India's small and medium enterprises have historically struggled to access formal credit because they lack the traditional financial documentation banks rely on for underwriting. Khanduja framed this as a mutual failure rather than a one-sided gap: "MSMEs always needed capital and banks always wanted to lend, but they never really understood each other."
His proposed fix is embedded finance and contextual lending—delivering credit decisions where business activity actually happens (point of sale, transaction flows) rather than requiring merchants to walk into a branch with paperwork they may not have.
The report cites an illustrative example: a merchant referred to as "Priya" receiving a pre-approved credit line of Rs 10 lakh based on her transaction history. It's unclear whether this is a real case study or a hypothetical used to make the point—the report does not specify.
What's actually being proposed
The core idea is straightforward: banks can use transaction data generated through digital payments to assess creditworthiness and extend timely working capital to MSMEs, without waiting for conventional financial statements. In theory, this shifts lending from a documentation-first model to a data-first one.
Several important details remain unaddressed in what's been shared publicly so far:
- How exactly Mintoak's transaction data is used or shared with partner banks for credit decisions
- What criteria determine a "pre-approved" credit line
- How many MSMEs, if any, have actually received credit through this embedded approach
Without this information, it's hard to assess whether the model is operating at meaningful scale or is still largely conceptual.
Why founders should care
For fintech founders, this is worth paying attention to on two levels.
First, there's a plausible opportunity in building contextual lending tools that sit on top of payment infrastructure—tools that use transaction data to trigger credit offers rather than requiring merchants to apply through traditional channels. Mintoak's footprint across multiple large banks and regions suggests there may be real demand for this kind of merchant-facing credit layer, though the report doesn't quantify that demand.
- Second, the broader signal here is directional: payments infrastructure alone is likely not the end state. Founders building purely in QR/payments may want to consider whether data-driven financial services—lending, working capital, embedded credit—represent a more durable layer to compete on, especially as the payments space matures.
That said, two risks are worth weighing. MSMEs could remain excluded from credit if embedded finance and contextual lending stay confined to pilots rather than reaching wide deployment. And using transaction data for lending decisions may raise data privacy or access concerns among merchants—questions the report doesn't resolve given the lack of detail on how data is shared with partner banks.
The bottom line
Khanduja's message is less a product pitch and more a sequencing argument: digital payments built the rails, but credit access is the payoff most MSMEs still haven't seen. Whether embedded lending delivers on that promise at scale—or stays confined to examples like Priya's—is the open question founders in this space should watch closely.