Mukesh Ambani

A successful fintech loans platform draws upon what the Bank for International Settlements calls a self-reinforcing “DNA loop,” shorthand for data, ...

But the basic building block will be credit: Jio Financial will hit the ground running by originating keenly priced loans to Reliance’s vast network of consumers and merchants. Eventually, the group’s financial services business will seek to become a conglomerate in its own right, with a presence in everything from payments and insurance to digital broking and asset management. Whether they deserve it — and how much — is either left to traditional credit-scoring models, which tend to exclude a broad swathe of the unbanked population. — to double down on the consumer business and put some sizzle back in the stock. Investors will get one share of the new firm for every share held in Reliance. A windfall Indian tax on transportation fuels and weak refining and polymer margins are hurting the conglomerate’s legacy petrochemicals and energy operations. Yet, as last Friday’s earnings report showed, even after growing by a third over two years, the average revenue per user is only a little more than $2 per month. As the billionaire businessman targets his 428 million subscribers with a new 5G service and seeks to lure another 300 million feature-phone users to smartphones, the challenge facing him has changed. When he was starting out six years ago, how to sell data in a developing country was the big issue. The most profitable use of granular customer information in a country like India lies in broadening access to credit: More than three-fifths of the adult population is either invisible to traditional scoring models or not considered worth the trouble by lending institutions. A successful fintech loans platform draws upon what the Bank for International Settlements calls a self-reinforcing “DNA loop,” shorthand for data, network and activity. The shares topped out at about 30 times forward earnings two years ago; they’re currently trading at a multiple of 20.