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.
The timing could hardly have been worse. Aggarwal graduated into the aftermath of 9/11 and the dotcom bust, when Wall Street was shedding jobs and employers carried an unspoken bias against South Asian candidates. What followed was a lesson in persistence. He cold-emailed thousands of people every day—seeking advice, information, interviews, any opening at all. Most never replied. Some did.
In 2002, that persistence paid off with a role at Goldman Sachs in fixed income. There, Aggarwal taught himself finance, enrolled in the CFA programme, and began navigating an industry that often rewards pedigree over grit. Two years later, he moved to Lehman Brothers’ investment banking team, working on large telecom and media deals under brutal hours and intense pressure. He thrived, earning a promotion to the M&A team and working closely with financial sponsors such as Carlyle and General Atlantic.
In 2007, just before the global financial crisis, Aggarwal joined General Atlantic as an investor. The role changed how he viewed business. Sitting across the table from entrepreneurs every day, he realised he wanted to build companies, not just evaluate them. After a couple of years, he headed to The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania for an MBA—partly, he says, as “unemployment insurance” while he explored entrepreneurial ideas.
Birth of an NBFC
One early plan was to set up data centres in India, but he soon shelved it. “The cost of power was too high—it was simply too early,” he recalls. In 2012, family pulled him back to India. “Both my wife Shruti and I wanted our children to grow up close to their grandparents and cousins,” he says.
Back home, Aggarwal returned to investing, joining Everstone Capital. Over four years, he backed businesses across logistics and lending—and saw up close how India’s retail credit ecosystem worked. Or didn’t. Customers were forced through dense paperwork, opaque pricing and risky handovers of personal documents to agents. “The experience felt broken,” he says. “And technology wasn’t being used to fix it.”
When Aggarwal quit Everstone in 2016, there was no safety net. Private equity, he notes, is a one-way street. “Once you leave, you can’t really go back.” Still, he was convinced. Along with Shruti—now his co-founder—he applied to the Reserve Bank of India for an NBFC licence instead of buying one, a move many warned against. The process, to their surprise, was constructive. By March 2017, Stashfin had its licence.
From day one, Stashfin broke from the typical NBFC mould. It offered unsecured personal loans via flexible credit lines with pre-approved limits, charging interest only on the amount used and allowing customers to exit without foreclosure fees. Good repayment behaviour translated into lower pricing over time.
The first two years were experimental. Explaining flexible credit online proved harder than pushing standard personal loans. The team tested everything—digital acquisition, digital collections, default behaviour, repeat usage. Then Covid hit. Lending was paused entirely as the company shifted its focus to collections. Having lived through earlier global crises, Aggarwal’s instinct was survival first. Fresh lending resumed in 2021.
Smarter Credit
Today, Stashfin has grown nearly 30x since inception, generated cumulative revenues of over $500 million, stayed profitable, and burned less than $5 million in equity capital. Aggarwal’s ambitions are now broader: to move beyond lending and build a full-stack financial services company. Stashfin already offers credit card bill payments, insurance and access to corporate bonds.
The idea that began with a rejected credit card application is now a bet on rebuilding trust in India’s credit system—one customer at a time.