Ongoing Projects

CAF collaborated with the Punjab and Sind Bank in 2025. The collaboration aims to enable street vendors to move beyond basic credit access towards sustainable enterprise growth through structured credit, targeted training, and practical tools to enhance business growth.

Key Highlights:

• Addresses the limitation of small working capital loans by creating clear pathways for vendor growth into micro-enterprises.
• Implemented through a CAF partnership with Punjab & Sind Bank (PSB) to support street vendors with credit and business capability building.
• Uses randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with ~2,600 vendors, leveraging transaction data, savings behaviour, and SVANidhi repayment records.
• Tests smart loan sizing, identifies high-potential vendors, and strengthens digital and business practices.
• Develops a scalable, bank-ready credit framework that improves repayment discipline, reduces reliance on informal lending, and supports financial inclusion.
• In partnership with Punjab & Sind Bank (PSB)

A data-driven platform designed to expand formal credit access for underserved households and micro-enterprises by enabling reliable, alternative credit assessment.

Key Highlights:

• Addresses limited access to formal credit caused by fragmented or unreliable financial data.
• Tackles challenges in assessing creditworthiness of new-to-credit individuals and micro-enterprises lacking formal documentation.
• Proposes a data-driven Information Bureau using verified government data to enable alternative credit scoring.
• Expands formal credit access, strengthens financial inclusion, and supports a scalable, privacy-preserving credit model.
• Offers future applications in targeted welfare delivery, risk-based credit guarantees, poverty tracking, urban planning, and eligibility verification, enabling data-led governance.

(FTBM & RM–SME Programs)

An impact evaluation of SBI’s managerial training programs to assess how structured capability-building influences branch performance, leadership effectiveness, and operational outcomes.

Key Highlights:

• Addresses the need for stronger capability-building among first-time branch and SME managers to meet growing operational demands.
• Evaluates how training impacts CASA growth, loan processing, NPA management, and customer interactions.
• Assesses improvements in staff morale, compliance discipline, and digital system adoption across branches.
• Uses an integrated evaluation framework combining administrative data, pre–post analysis, and quasi-experimental methods.
• Develops performance and leadership indices, supported by dashboards and feedback tools for continuous monitoring and improvement.

Building predictive, data-driven lending frameworks for women-led Self-Help Groups.

An initiative to strengthen Self-Help Group (SHG) lending by moving from reputation-based assessment to data-driven, predictive credit models.

Key Highlights:

• Addresses limitations of current SHG lending, which relies on group reputation and manual checks, constraining scalability and predictive accuracy.
• Introduces data-driven and ML-based credit scoring to improve borrower-level risk assessment and repayment monitoring.
• Identifies gaps in qualitative loan appraisal and generates early warning signals for repayment stress.
• Supports a scalable hybrid lending framework, combining federation oversight with transparent, data-backed credit decisions.
• Strengthens women-led SHG credit systems, improving risk management, inclusion, and responsible credit expansion.

A portfolio of AI-driven credit evaluation initiatives designed to expand fair, data-backed financial access for women, SHGs, and rural communities.

Data-Driven Rural Credit Analysis in Karnataka

Advanced analytics to improve group-level portfolio quality and enable scalable, community-based credit solutions for SHGs and rural micro-entrepreneurs.