Indian Credit Information Moving Into Foreign Hands In The Age Of AI

Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s meandering novel Love In The Time Of The Cholera  writes of a continual but varied love between different protagonists from youth to old age with a leading pair to anchor the story. This love itself, a main character, is not just an emotion but all-consuming force that keeps mutating. The novel contrasts decades of passionate longing, letters pored over, short affairs that inevitably occur, denial, lies, confessions, underpinned by the virtues of companionable, respectable, marriage. The cholera is the possibility of lurking disease and sudden death in the backdrop.

Attempts to make money are similar in their energy.The everlasting quest between potential seller and buyer fuelled by an unquenchable, amoral, immortal ambition. Nowadays it is not enough to be enticing via advertisements and brand ambassadors. The commercial engine wants an inside track like the Watergate break-ins. This is via the collection of profile and financial data, history, habits, all to be yoked together with new-fangled artificial intelligence and super-fast data-crunching.

Meta, which grew out of a Harvard college room and began as Facebook, those decades ago in order to connect students on campus, has recently paid 900 million USD for a 20% stake in the Indian firm CRED. This, while hiring its founder Kunal Shah as head of WhatsApp worldwide. The platform is one of Meta’s prior acquisitions. WhatsApp now has an Indian consumer base of 500 million people. CRED has more than 17 million users via incentivisation to join. It processes more than 40% of credit card payments in the country. Obviously their data base contains a lot of the better-heeled.

You can already see the Love in the Time of the Cholera style meandering. It is tentacular, going relentlessly into mostly American hands. More so, when you contemplate the money-flows. Who can resist fat USD offers? Certainly not the bright Indians that create marvellous digital architecture such as Aadhar and UPI, and brilliant payment apps, acknowledged as the best in the world.

Walmart via its purchase of Flipkart now controls 72% of PhonePe. Google owns GooglePay of course, and Meta owns WhatsApp Pay with its 500 million potential Indian users. That’s more people than several Western country populations put together. And remember India is growing at roughly 7% in GDP year-on-year. It has a middle class with purchasing power approaching 750 million people.

India offers a humungous consumer market size with its 1.5 billion strong population, the biggest in the world now. China may be almost as populous but it controls its own digital architecture and financial apps 100%, with no foreigner interests whatsoever. However, their consumers are concentrated in their urban hubs and not so spread out as in India with its multiple tiers of cities and towns all full of aspiration.

The fig leaf that allows access to it all is called consent. But every time an individual or organisation uses a private financial app, the process involves agreeing to a lot of profile and credit information including past transactions, spending habits, and so on, passing over seamlessly to forces unknown. This information can be used in a variety of ways-to sell various goods, services, financial products, insurance, wealth management, offer loans, buy property. And, if things go awry, or there is motivation towards it, lead to cyber-attacks via compromised passwords and other data in online platforms connected to laptops, smart phones.

India also has official credit profiling organisations. These collect and analyse credit and loan repayment data to calculate credit scores for individuals and credit ranking for businesses. But even here the meandering tentacles of the foreign entities is apparent. CRISIL is an S&P company, ICRA is an affiliate of Moody’s, another, IND-RA is affiliated to Fitch. So sovereignty over financial and other dats does not exist.

It is reasonable to conclude that despite some government oversight from the RBI and SEBI, the entire space is infiltrated by mostly American organisations. It is already too late to worry about credit information slipping into foreign hands though purchases such as the one just made by Meta may give us a jolt. Perhaps the consequent goods and services available to Indians benefit from the international ownership. Many countries have little problem with selling most things not directly connected to national security to others. What frenemies like China and outright enemies like Pakistan could do with our data is worrisome, but the horse nevertheless seems to have bolted. To worry about it in nationalist terms despite the security implications, is futile without the indigenous investment and infrastructure to go with it. The motive forces are a combination of the passion of uncontrolled love combined with the logic and sedateness of marriage. Gabriel Garcia Marquez knew what he was writing about and the vagaries of human nature. Even though it is difficult to see the substance in the people who bemoan the transfer of Indian financial data to foreign hands without the ability to offer alternatives. Are they failing to acknowledge a ground reality? And in the end, nobody can sell you anything unless you are willing to buy. Buying and selling is a lot like love after all.

(855 words)

June 25^th, 2026

For: Firstpost/News18.com

Gautam Mukherjee