Naveen Budda, Financial Systems Leader Re-Engineering Credit Underwriting For India’s Gig And Blue-Collar Workforce

Naveen Budda is a financial systems leader whose work has focused on redesigning how credit underwriting systems interpret income and risk for India’s non-salaried workforce. As a co-founder of KarmaLife, he has led the architectural development of regulated lending platforms built specifically for gig and blue-collar workers, a segment long excluded by traditional credit models despite stable earning capacity.

Naveen thinks that the financial system in India has always been made for people who get a salary and have a lot of papers to prove it. This leaves out a lot of workers who do not get a salary and have different kinds of income. Naveen wants to change this. He wants to look at how people make and use money instead of just looking at papers.

He is trying to change the way banks decide who can get a loan. Of just looking at what people have he wants to look at how they behave with money. This means he has to think about everything in a way like how to figure out someone’s income and how to understand their cash flow. He also has to think about how to decide if someone is a risk for a loan and how to manage loans over time. Naveen’s work is about making the financial system work better for people, in India especially for people who do not get a salary.

At KarmaLife Naveen has been really important in creating systems that bring together information from gig platforms bank accounts and transaction histories. This helps to get an idea of how stable the income of workers is. These systems are made to work within the rules of lending, in India. They have to be innovative but follow the rules really closely when it comes to keeping data safe getting consent and governing credit at KarmaLife. KarmaLife has to balance these things. His work has shown that credit can be given to people who do not have a salary without making the whole system more risky. This is possible if the people who make the credit models think about the lives of these -salaried workers when they design the models. His work with credit and non-salaried workers is very important. Credit, for -salaried workers can be a good thing if it is done correctly.

Naveen is really good at engineering and product architecture and policy-aware design. He works with lenders and regulators and other partners to make sure that ways of deciding who to lend money to are good and make sense for the institutions. This means he has to take what people are doing on the ground and turn it into something that big financial institutions can trust and use. Naveen’s work has helped connect financial technology to the traditional financial systems. He does this by making sure that new ideas in fintech work with the systems. Naveen’s expertise in engineering and product architecture is very important, in this process.

Naveen does a lot more than design systems. He is also very involved in coming up with a plan for products that help workers with their health. For example he works on creating credit products that work well with the income that some workers have. He also makes sure that there are safeguards in place to prevent workers from borrowing much money. He designs ways for workers to pay back loans that take into account the fact that their earnings can be unpredictable. The way Naveen works shows that he is thinking about the term and wants to make sure that workers are included in a way that is sustainable and trustworthy rather than just trying to give them credit quickly. Naveen’s idea of inclusion is about being sustainable and building trust with workers, than just trying to expand credit in the short term.

Naveen is a person who people look up to when it comes to the future of credit for workers. He thinks that it is not about people being able to get credit but it has to be something that really helps them. This means that the things they offer like products and systems have to be made for the kind of life people are living. Naveen knows a lot about the details of finance. He also understands what is going on with workers in India. So he has been able to help change the way banks and other financial institutions think about things like risk and making money. The chances people have. Naveen has really made a difference, in how people think about credit for emerging workforces.

Through his leadership and system-building work, Naveen Budda continues to influence how credit infrastructure evolves to meet the needs of a changing workforce, helping lay the foundation for a more inclusive and resilient financial ecosystem.

India’s digital economy has transformed how people work, but the systems governing access to formal credit have lagged behind. For millions of non-salaried workers, income is steady yet irregular, predictable in behaviour but difficult to express within the formats conventional underwriting systems expect. The result has been a persistent gap between earning and eligibility, one that policymakers and researchers increasingly recognise as a limitation of financial infrastructure rather than borrower risk.

Budda’s work begins at this structural mismatch. Traditional underwriting systems evolved around salaried employment, relying on fixed pay cycles, static thresholds, and uniform documentation. These assumptions work for a narrow segment of the workforce, but they systematically misclassify non-salaried income as uncertainty. According to Budda, the issue is not volatility of earnings, but the inability of existing systems to measure continuity and reliability over time.

The shift he has championed is a redesign of the decision layer itself. Rather than relying on point-in-time income snapshots, the systems Budda helped architect evaluate longitudinal income behaviour, separating volatility that reflects the nature of work from signals of genuine financial instability. This approach reframes creditworthiness as a behavioural measure rather than a formatting exercise.

Industry analysts describe this transition as a move from threshold-based underwriting to behaviour-aware decision architectures. By changing how income is interpreted rather than lowering lending standards, these systems expand access while preserving portfolio discipline. Independent reviews of platforms built under this model indicate that over two million worker families have accessed formal credit through such architectures, many for the first time.

As automated lending systems face increasing regulatory scrutiny, another dimension of Budda’s work has drawn attention. Governance by design ensures that each credit decision preserves a complete, replayable record of data inputs, policy rules, and system state. This allows outcomes to be reviewed and explained long after execution, aligning closely with the Reserve Bank of India’s emphasis on traceability and accountability in digital lending systems.

Researchers caution that expanded access alone is not sufficient. Without restraint mechanisms, easier credit can amplify financial stress. Systems designed under this architectural approach apply conservative initial exposure and expand limits progressively, based on demonstrated repayment behaviour. Credit access becomes a controlled pathway rather than a one-time event.

The broader significance of this work extends beyond individual platforms. As India’s workforce becomes increasingly non-salaried, the challenge facing financial institutions is no longer whether these workers can repay loans, but whether existing systems are capable of recognising how they earn. The answer, Budda’s work suggests, lies not in relaxing standards, but in rebuilding the foundations on which credit decisions are made.

The opportunity is clear. By redesigning decision-layer infrastructure to reflect real income behaviour, regulated lending systems can expand inclusion without compromising accountability. For India’s financial sector, the path forward is not about adding exceptions to existing models, but about creating systems that finally understand the economy they serve.