Persistence pays

A REJECTED CREDIT CARD APPLICATION PUSHED A WALL STREET RETURN TO BUILD STASHFIN - REIMAGING HOW LENDING WORKS FOR BORROWERS BANKS OVERLOOK

- AYANTI BERA

HE HAD WALL Street on his resume—but not a credit card in India. When Tushar Aggarwal moved back home after more than a decade in global finance, the system that was supposed to welcome him shut its doors.

An engineer by training, a Wharton MBA, with stints at Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and General Atlantic, Aggarwal still couldn’t get a credit card. The problem, he realised, wasn’t his balance sheet—it was India’s broken credit experience.

"If someone like me was struggling despite being creditworthy, something was clearly wrong," Aggarwal tells FE. That frustration would become the spark for Stashfin, a tech-led non-banking finance company (NBFC) built on a simple idea: credit should be transparent, flexible and accessible—especially to people traditional banks overlook.

Aggarwal’s journey to entrepreneurship doesn’t follow the usual Indian startup arc. He grew up in a middle-class Delhi household—his father an electrical engineer, his mother a postgraduate in the arts—and studied at St Columba’s School. A scholarship took him to Stony Brook University in the US in 1999, where he pursued electrical engineering with a minor in business.