Five years ago, on the 23rd of February, we launched the EarlySalary MVP with the belief that it would become the foundation of a credit ecosystem that improves people’s lives in meaningful, tangible ways. We were a small team working around the clock, often sleepless, driven by the vision of making credit accessible to everyone.
The thesis behind Fibe was simple. We observed that:
- Many customers need a salary advance, and no one was addressing that need effectively.
- About 99% of these customers repay on time.
- The entire experience can be delivered via a mobile app without human intervention, which means the customer experience must be excellent.
With those principles, in the first 180 days more than 10,000 people tried our product. They didn’t just like the idea — many returned with suggestions that helped us improve. That feedback motivated us to keep working harder. EarlySalary evolved into a full digital lending service capable of managing hundreds of thousands of customers for borrowing, repayment, and engagement.
The journey to a viable business model
As we persevered and built a platform to address our customers’ credit needs, personal loans became a natural extension of our offerings while we retained a focus on shorter-tenure loans. Innovation followed: we introduced credit for online shopping, formed direct partnerships with corporations to provide credit to all employees—blue, grey, and white—and broadened our product set. This second phase grew EarlySalary to over 100,000 active customers. What mattered most to us, though, was customer feedback and appreciation, and we measured our success by those metrics above all else.
Gaining customer trust and love
In the next stage, our focus was to be loved by our customers. To excel at this, we concentrated on two priorities:
- Self-serve as a clear focus: customers should be able to borrow, repay, get answers, set up repayments, increase limits, or resolve issues entirely through the app. We call this the Uberization of lending.
- Going beyond just lending: we created a universal credit limit customers can use and repay anytime. It can be used to withdraw cash, shop, or travel, making EarlySalary a recurring and meaningful part of daily life instead of a one-off transactional service.
Our data showed many customers were referred by existing users, which is the endorsement we aimed for. We didn’t just meet credit needs; we built a brand customers were comfortable recommending.
One platform for all products
We then expanded our vision to become a single platform for all of our customers’ lending needs, offering more product choices. Each new product introduced new risks, required fresh innovation, and demanded redesigned product journeys. Credit to our Risk and Product teams for building the railways that let customers borrow for any need and for establishing the backbone for our checkout and Salary Card businesses.
Today, customers are managed on a dynamic behavioral risk scorecard, enabling longer-tenure borrowing when needed, financing for skill upgrades, or shopping on EMIs. This capability is now powering partnerships to offer No Cost EMI for consumer products as we scale to serve our 500,000 active customers.
Sustainability as a business
Financial services startups have faced steep challenges in recent years: NBFC crises, bank failures, capital shortages, and the pandemic’s difficulties. We are grateful to the teams who stayed focused on doing what’s right for customers, emphasizing automation and disciplined operations. Those choices helped us navigate turbulent times and build a sustainable business. Over the past two years we’ve scaled to process ten times more loans and are among the highest-rated fintech apps in India. Most importantly, we’ve become a part of our customers’ lives — that has always been the goal.
What’s next for our customers and the EarlySalary team?
Although we’ve achieved important milestones, the journey continues. We’re working on a pipeline of products and features to serve every credit need — from cards to Buy Now Pay Later, from salary advances to personal loans — and to be the first choice for our customers. Our aim is to reach a point where even more people recommend us to friends, family, and employers.
A message to the EarlySalary family: we must grow tenfold in the next 24 months. That will happen only if we keep doing what brought us here — remain focused on being part of our customers’ lives by providing meaningful credit that upgrades their financial choices.
Celebrating five years of the EarlySalary app
Akshay & Ashish