Phocket: Solving the Mid-Month Cash Crunch with AI-Powered pH Score and Digital Inclusion

"Everything revolves around your salary date—your expenses, your planning, your life. But by the mid or end of the month, most salaried employees face a cash crunch." This universal pain point is what Piyush Jain, founder of Phocket, set out to solve in 2018. By leveraging a proprietary AIML algorithm known as the pH Score, Phocket is providing instant, affordable access to cash for India's subprime salaried segment, proving that digital lending can be both profitable and deeply inclusive.

Founded by a team of finance and tech veterans—Piyush, Sumit, and Mohit—Phocket is bridging the "credit gap" for thin-file customers who are often ignored by traditional banks. With a focus on speed, transparency, and education, the platform has grown to serve a diverse set of needs, from medical emergencies to the financial inclusion of tea garden workers in Assam. By transforming alternative data into actionable credit insights, Phocket is ensuring that mid-month financial stress becomes a thing of the past.

The pH Score: Underwriting the "Invisible" Borrower

Traditional credit scoring (like CIBIL) relies on a long history of debt repayment. For a first-time borrower or a lower-income worker, this system is a brick wall. Phocket’s in-house algorithm, the **pH Score**, looks beyond the bureau to understand the person behind the phone.

"We use over 5,000 data points with user consent," Jain explains. "From spending patterns and mobile app usage to location analysis and SMS trade lines, we build a holistic profile. For example, a user with LinkedIn and productivity apps gets a positive score, while a phone filled with betting apps signals higher risk. This allows us to underwrite people that a bank simply wouldn't touch."

Niche Inclusion: From Tea Gardens to Hospitals

While digital-only acquisition is the norm for fintechs, Phocket is experimenting with offline pilots to reach even deeper into the underserved segments. In the **Tea Gardens of Assam**, Phocket is providing salary advance loans to over 10 lakh workers. This isn't just about lending; it's about digital education.

"We are teaching them how to do digital transactions and providing them with insurance covers," says Jain. Similarly, in Delhi, Phocket has launched a **"Care Now Pay Later"** (CNPL) service for healthcare. Since 30% of their customers were already using loans for medical reasons, this pilot allows for direct monitoring of the use case, ensuring that affordable credit is available when health is on the line.

The Ethics of Collection: Education over Escalation

Default management is the biggest challenge in subprime lending. Phocket takes an "educative" approach rather than a purely aggressive one. By aligning collection dates with the customer’s salary date and sending reminders five days in advance, they minimize accidental defaults. 95% of their customers repay simply by being educated on how a default affects their future job prospects and societal status.

"We have zero tolerance for escalation," Jain notes. "We are here for the long term. If a customer has a genuine medical issue or job loss, we work with them to find a 'Promise to Pay' (PTP) date. We want to support the customer, not just collect the money."

Leadership and the Marwadi Instinct

Coming from a Marwadi background, entrepreneurship was ingrained in Piyush Jain from childhood. However, he chose to gain institutional experience first, working with **Goldman Sachs** and **Flipkart** to understand how to solve problems at scale. This blend of traditional business sense and high-tech "Pioneer" culture allowed him to build Phocket as a bootstrap venture for its first two years, achieving a healthy product-market fit before raising institutional capital.

The Future: Overtaking Traditional Lending

With a trillion-dollar opportunity in digital lending over the next few years, Phocket is preparing for its next phase of expansion. Jain believes that by 2030, digital lending will fully overtake traditional methods. As Phocket scales from its initial seed round toward a Series A, the mission remains the same: ensuring that every Indian, regardless of their credit file, has an affordable "pocket" of cash when they need it most.

"We've just started," Jain concludes. "The industry is witnessing a healthy growth rate, and Phocket is here to ensure that financial inclusion is a digital reality for all of Bharat."

Key Takeaways

For Fintech Innovators: Look for the "mid-month" problem. High-frequency, small-ticket lending is a better retention tool than high-ticket, low-frequency loans.

For Underbanked Borrowers: Your app usage and social media presence (like LinkedIn) are your new credit assets. Clean digital habits lead to better loan offers.

For Investors: Profitability in subprime lending is possible if you own the full tech stack and the collection engine, focusing on LTV rather than one-off disbursements.

About the Guest

Piyush Jain is the Founder and CEO of Phocket. A Chartered Accountant and MBA from IIFT Delhi, he has a decade of experience across Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, and Flipkart. Under his leadership, Phocket has become a leading digital lending platform, pioneering the use of alternative data through its pH Score to provide instant credit to India's underserved salaried workforce.