FinBox launches Sentinel AI to streamline credit decisioning for lenders

By Gloria Methri

FinBox, a provider of credit infrastructure and risk solutions in India, has launched Sentinel AI, a centralised decisioning platform designed to improve lending operations’ efficiency, visibility and control.

The platform already processes over 50 million credit decisions monthly and has enabled disbursals worth several thousand crores. Its launch comes at a time when India’s digital lending market is projected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2030. Meanwhile, the average mid-sized non-banking financial company (NBFC) is now managing loan originations from over a dozen channels — four times the number handled in 2019.

This increase in distribution points has created operational strain, with lending institutions struggling to maintain consistency in fraud checks, underwriting, compliance and customer verification across platforms.

Sentinel AI addresses these issues by offering a unified interface that integrates decisioning across all origination channels. Built with conversational artificial intelligence, the platform allows lending professionals to automate and manage tasks such as identity verification, fraud detection, underwriting, and dynamic pricing through generative AI-powered assistants.

By centralising credit decisioning processes, Sentinel AI aims to reduce inefficiencies caused by fragmentation and support digital lenders in scaling responsibly in a growing and increasingly complex credit environment.

“Five years ago, most loans came through a bank’s website or branch. Today, we are seeing money move through super-apps, direct selling agents, and dozens of other touchpoints,” said Rajat Deshpande, CEO and Co-Founder of FinBox. “Each channel presents unique fraud patterns, risk profiles, and partnership terms. It is like trying to conduct traffic at a sixteen-way intersection using separate rulebooks for each road.”

A key innovation within Sentinel AI is its conversational AI interface. This feature enables lending teams to update and apply complex credit policies using natural language instructions rather than technical coding. As a result, policy changes that previously took weeks to implement can now be deployed in minutes, improving responsiveness while preserving strategic oversight.

For players looking to compete in India’s hot digital economy, the technology could level the playing field. “Traditional banks and NBFCs have been forced to choose between missing opportunities or accepting unhealthy risk,” explained Srijan Nagar, Co-Founder of FinBox. Our mission is to eliminate that false choice.”