India's lenders wire AI agents into loans before the guardrails land (opens the source in a new tab)
- Sharat Chandra argues the bank incidents had no attacker: agents did their jobs badly. At Kotak, customers applied for cards they didn't qualify for, and each rejection's hard bureau enquiry dented their scores. At Axis, an agent read 'remove' as delete.
- Agents are moving into lending. Bajaj Finance's Q2 FY27 deck lists 130 AI agent AI software that takes actions on its own, like booking, buying or moving money, not just answering questions. and ₹2,744 crore disbursed from bot leads; Tata Capital says over 95% of personal and business loans get AI-assisted underwriting.
- He proposes six controls, including an agent registry, per-task access and board-overseen kill switches.
- 130
- AI agents at Bajaj Finance
- 95%+
- Tata Capital loans with AI underwriting
Why it matters A wrong marketing pitch annoys; a wrong credit or collections call decides who borrows and how debts are chased. That is where agents are heading, and least-privilege access clashes with the shared data setups banks have built.
Other side RBI's June draft on model risk already names human oversight and kill switches. Once final, much of this gap could close; the exposure is the months before it does.