# Miss a smartphone EMI, and your lender can now wirelessly strip the ‘smart’ out of it

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/daybreak-5886514/miss-a-smartphone-emi-and-your-lender-can-now-wirelessly-strip-the-smart-out-of-it
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/daybreak-5886514/miss-a-smartphone-emi-and-your-lender-can-now-wirelessly-strip-the-smart-out-of-it.md
Podcast: [Daybreak](https://stenobird.com/podcast/daybreak-5886514)
Published: 2026-07-10T01:00:49+00:00
Episode link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/47d102e3
Audio file: https://media.transistor.fm/47d102e3/4fceecea.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/daybreak-5886514/episodes/miss-a-smartphone-emi-and-your-lender-can-now-wirelessly-strip-the-smart-out-of-it
Duration seconds: 1443

## Resource

Naresh drives for Rapido. When his phone died, so did his income — for seven days, until he could borrow enough to replace it. Until 2024, India's biggest consumer lenders had turned that exact vulnerability into a recovery tool. Miss an EMI, lose your phone. It worked so well that smartphone lending grew from 1% to nearly 40% of consumer borrowing in three years. Then the RBI banned it. Lending collapsed by 80%. Delinquencies rose. Rejection rates hit 50%. Now the tool is coming back. This time with guardrails. The question is whether they're enough. *We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here . Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

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## Transcript

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