Bharat Collections Summit & Awards 2025 Spotlights India's ₹55,000 Cr Recovery Market

Mint

20-06-2025

India's debt collections sector, valued at ₹ 55,000 crore as per a McKinsey and Spocto X report, is emerging as a critical force in the broader credit ecosystem. At a time when conversations around responsible lending and recovery are gaining ground, the Bharat Collections Summit & Awards 2025 provided a timely and focused event to foreground this pivotal but often underrepresented function. As India's largest collections event it brought together some of the nation's major lenders, collections leaders, agencies and policymakers.
Held at The Lalit, Mumbai on 12th June 2025, and organised by The Brainalytics, the event brought together more than 200 senior leaders from over 50 financial institutions. Spocto X served as the Presenting Partner, while YuCollect was the Collections Infrastructure Partner. The day-long summit aimed to reframe collections not just as an operational necessity but as a strategic, tech-enabled driver of financial stability.
Find the spotlight on leaders reimagining collections
Anil Tandon, Senior EVP – Retail Portfolio Management, HDFC Bank, opened the summit with a keynote on the 'AI Revolution in Collections.'His metaphor of'compliance as the third umpire' struck a chord across the room — positioning AI as a strategic partner in driving customer fairness and smarter recoveries.
This sentiment carried through the day. Krishnendu Majumdar, CPTO, Yubi Group, challenged the industry to look beyond cost-saving and view collections as a growth driver. He called for'agentic AI' to help institutions scale ethically into underserved Bharat.
Sagar Chaudhuri, SVP II & Head – Strategy, HDFC Bank, reinforced the urgency of creating more unified systems and transparent data flows, advocating for infrastructure-level reform that can scale responsibly.
In a grounded and highly practical session, Sanju Mangrulkar, General Manager – Credit Monitoring & Policy, Central Bank of India, discussed how his team is already using AI to trace alternate borrower contacts and surface asset-related data to aid recoveries.
Sukhvinder Kaur, Chief General Manager, State Bank of India, offered insights into the scale at which SBI is deploying technology. She shared that SBI — with one of the largest retail lending portfolios in the country — is using over 150 in-house AI models across fraud detection, early warning signals, and predictive collections. She emphasised that digital-first lending must be supported by digital-first collections, highlighting how AI enables personalised nudges, life-cycle monitoring, and customer-centric recovery strategies.
DS Tripathi, Executive Director, Aadhar Housing Finance, drew attention to the operational realities of small-ticket lending, arguing that inefficient systems increase credit costs and can ultimately threaten business viability.
Adding to the conversation on technology-led infrastructure, Bhavin Parekh, Co-Founder of YuCollect, anchored a panel on digital design and collections operations at scale. The discussion focused on how a unified, intelligent framework could create measurable impact across stakeholders.
Throughout the day, panel sessions brought together experts from a wide range of institutions including ICICI Home Finance, SBI, John Deere Financial, Cent Bank Home Finance, IDBI Bank, Aadhar Housing Finance, Tyger Capital, Bajaj Capital, NPCI, Bank of Baroda, DBS, Poonawalla Fincorp, DCB Bank, Karnataka Bank, and Fibe.Topics ranged from regulatory compliance to empathetic borrower engagement, and from vendor management to the future of automation in collections.
The Central Bank of India team received the 'Outstanding Achievement in Collections Strategy' award.
As the day progressed, a shared consensus began to emerge — that India's collections sector must transition from reactive operations to proactive systems, rooted in ethics, data governance, and long-term sustainability.
The evening featured the inaugural Bharat Collections Awards, designed to recognise excellence and innovation within the industry. Devarsh Mapuskar, Business Head, Spocto X, and Kapil Rohilla, Head of Operations, Spocto X, led the awards ceremony. Nilesh Dasri, Product Head – Digital Debt Servicing, ICICI Bank, joined the Spocto X leadership in felicitating the winners.
Central Bank of India was named 'Best Collection Team of the Year,' a recognition accepted by Sanju Mangrulkar, Sukesh Jha, R.L. Nayak, and Amit Verma. Other notable awardees included Datta Chavan of Reliance ARC for innovation in collection practices,Vishal Chugh of Tata Capital as Debt Management Innovator, and Binit Jha of IDBI Bank as the 'Most Promising CDO'. Girish Patnaik of Bank of Baroda was honoured for their contributions to digital collections, while Ashish Jain, also from Bank of Baroda, received recognition for 'Ethical Leader in Risk and Debt Management'.
What set this summit apart was its clear call to action: the collections function is no longer just a back-end support unit but a strategic pillar that intersects with customer experience, credit health, and institutional trust. As Spocto X and YuCollect continue to shine a spotlight on the sector, the industry is inching closer to a future where collections are not just efficient and tech-driven, but also empathetic and inclusive.
This summit wasn't just a one-day gathering. It marked a foundational shift in how collections are viewed, managed, and evolved across institutions — from silos to systems, from paperwork to platforms, and from instinct to intelligence.