Compliance hub
The rules, and where each one is enforced
Indian collections is governed by RBI conduct expectations, the DPDP Act, TRAI's messaging regime and the statutory recovery process. This page maps each to the control that enforces it on the platform, with a plain-language explainer where one exists.
The map
Six regimes, six controls
Not legal advice. Each row describes how the platform behaves; your obligations as a regulated entity or its agent remain your own.
RBI Fair Practices Code
Reasonable hours and places, no harassment, disclosure of the lender and the debt, a grievance process. On the platform: calling windows in IST at dispatch, frequency caps, recording disclosure, a named grievance officer.
Quiet hours, explainedDPDP Act, 2023
The lender is the data fiduciary; we are the processor on written instructions. Consent state, retention schedules, erasure and legal hold are system properties with an audit trail.
Ten-question readiness checklistTRAI DLT
Every SMS template is bound to a TRAI DLT registration before it can be sent. Unregistered content cannot be dispatched, and the header is the lender's.
How messaging binds templatesRBI outsourcing and DRA norms
People who recover on a lender's behalf hold the IIBF Debt Recovery Agent certification and are police-verified. Conduct is trained for the lowest escalation rate and audited internally every cycle.
The six conduct controlsSARFAESI and the recovery track
Secured recovery follows the statutory notice periods; the ladder only reaches repossession, auction or filing when the earlier tiers have run, and every step is a recorded channel.
Legal and recovery channelsEvidence the auditor can check
Recording, transcript, receipts, geo-tags and dispositions written as they happen, on a hash-chained log with a Merkle anchor. A changed record breaks the chain and shows up.
Security and the evidence chainPeople controls
For managed and hybrid engagements
Where our people work your book, they are part of the control surface. Six controls, audited internally every cycle.
DRA-certified employees
Every caller and field officer holds the IIBF Debt Recovery Agent certification before they work an account.
Police clearance before hiring
Background screening with a mandatory Police Clearance Certificate, for the floor and the field.
Training for the lowest escalation rate
Outbound call training is measured on complaints avoided, not calls made.
Timelines enforced in software
Calling and field-visit windows are gates in the dialer and the FOS app, not lines in a policy document.
Periodic refresher training
Every employee re-trains on RBI conduct expectations on a fixed cycle.
Internal audit controls
Conduct, recordings and dispositions are sampled and audited internally every cycle.
Explainers
Working notes on the rules
Written to be useful whether or not you buy anything. No forms in front of any of it.
NPA, SARFAESI and what they mean on a collections floor
Classification and enforcement are usually treated as somebody else department. They set the clock a collections team is working against, and knowing where the thresholds sit changes what you do in month two.
Settlements and one-time settlement, done properly
A settlement is a decision to take less money now instead of more money later, or none at all. Made well it is the best outcome available. Made casually it is a discount given to borrowers who would have paid.
What is different about digital-lending collections
The borrower was acquired in minutes, never met anyone, and holds the loan entirely on a phone. Every one of those facts changes recovery, and mostly not in the lender favour.
Two-wheeler and consumer-durable collections
High volume, small tickets, thin margins and a secured asset that is often worth less than the cost of recovering it. This is where per-account economics decide the whole strategy.
Collections for microfinance and JLG books
Group lending has its own physics. Centre meetings, joint liability and weekly cycles mean the levers that work on a retail book can actively damage a microfinance one.
Where borrower data actually sits, and why the answer has to be specific
In India means little on its own. The useful answer names the systems, the copies and the vendors, including the ones that only hold the data for four seconds.
What a lender asks a collections partner, and what good answers look like
A BFSI vendor review is not a formality to be survived. It is a reasonable set of questions about what happens to your borrowers and your data, and most of them can be answered from the system or not at all.
A grievance process that actually resolves things
Every lender publishes a grievance mechanism. The difference between one that works and one that exists is whether a complaint changes anything other than its own status.
Disclosure on a collections call: who you are, why you are calling
The opening fifteen seconds of a collections call carry most of its compliance risk and most of its chance of working. They are usually left to the caller to improvise.
DLT registration for collections messaging, without the mystery
Most delivery failures on collections SMS in India are not network problems. They are registration problems, and they are entirely avoidable once somebody owns the template list.
DRA certification, and why it is not paperwork
Debt Recovery Agent certification is treated by many operations as a box to be ticked before an audit. Treated as training, it is the cheapest reduction in conduct risk available to a collections floor.
Alternate MetaData in India: when to spend, and what to expect back
Tracing is bought as a magic answer to unreachable accounts and usually delivers a partial one. Used with a rule about when to trigger it, it is one of the better rupees a collections operation spends.
Designing an escalation ladder that stops at the right rung
Escalation is easy to design going up and almost never designed going down. The result is an operation that spends its most expensive resources on borrowers who would have paid after a message.
In-house, agency or hybrid: choosing a collections model
The decision is usually made on cost per rupee recovered and then regretted on conduct, control and data. Here is the fuller comparison, including what each model is genuinely better at.
Cost to collect, computed honestly
Most cost-to-collect numbers are a commission rate with some overhead added. The useful version tells you which rupees you are spending to chase rupees you were never going to get.
Kept-promise rate: the metric that separates activity from recovery
Calls made, contacts reached and promises taken are all measures of effort. Promises kept is the first one that correlates with money, and it is the one most floors do not compute.
Roll rates: the number that tells you about next quarter
Recovery percentage tells you how last month went. Roll rate tells you what is coming. It is the closest thing collections has to a leading indicator, and it is usually calculated wrong.
DPD buckets, and why each one needs a different conversation
Days past due is the oldest number in collections and the most casually used. The buckets are not a reporting convention. They are four different problems that happen to share a book.
Integrating collections with your loan management system
The integration is rarely hard technically. It is hard because two systems disagree about what an account owes, and the disagreement surfaces in front of a borrower.
Call recordings: keeping them, finding them, and producing them
Recording every call is the easy part. The hard parts are finding one call two years later, proving it has not been altered, and knowing when you are allowed to delete it.
A collections data model that survives five lakh accounts
Systems that work fine on a pilot book of ten thousand accounts fail in specific, predictable ways at five lakh. Most of the failures are decisions made in the first month.
Closing the gap between a promise and the money
The promise-to-pay is the moment collections usually calls a win. The money arriving is a separate event, several days and several failure points later, and most of the loss happens in between.
WhatsApp for collections in India: what works, and what it is not for
It has the reach nothing else in India has, and the highest chance of being read. It is also the channel where a badly designed sequence turns into a screenshot on social media.
AI voice or a human caller: choosing per bucket, not per belief
The question is not whether AI voice is as good as your best telecaller. It is which conversations need your best telecaller at all, and what it costs you to spend them on reminders.
What a collections flow engine actually does
Every lender has a recovery strategy. Most of them keep it in a policy document, a set of Excel filters and the head of collections memory. A flow engine is what happens when you write it down once and let it run.
Quiet hours in Indian collections: what the rules actually require
The Fair Practices Code's contact-hours expectation is short. Operationalising it across voice, messaging and field is not. A plain-language walk-through.
A DPDP readiness checklist for collections teams
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act treats a delinquent borrower's data with the same seriousness as a customer's. Ten questions your operation should answer.
Why your disposition taxonomy is your collections strategy
Whatever your callers can record is all your analytics can ever know. The disposition list is not admin - it is the resolution of your entire feedback loop.
Anatomy of an AI collections call
What actually happens in the seconds between a borrower saying 'haan, bol raha hoon' and a payment link arriving on WhatsApp.
Send us the questionnaire.
The fastest way to evaluate a vendor's compliance posture is to make them fill in yours. We answer in writing, and the answers match this page.