Hi everyone,   

Welcome to the 177th edition of The Pattern, a weekly read on what’s moving technology, finance, and the economy. Let’s jump in. 

This week’s story is about India’s financial pulse gaining momentum. From the RBI proposing faster rails for inward remittances and credit card activity humming with record spends, to the bank margins tilting to stability, it's been a string of green lights in sequence. 

 Let’s take a closer look. 

‘Instant’ finally crossed the border 

For years, India’s domestic payments story has been running on immediacy. UPI turned money flows into ‘tap and done’ and we built habits around that certainty. Cross-border, though, never quite kept pace. A transfer could reach a bank abroad and still idle in the shadows before a beneficiary saw it. Currently, less than 8–10% of inward remittances in India are credited to beneficiary accounts within an hour, compared with about 75% in the US. This changes with the RBI’s new draft norms.  

The principle is clean: when an inward remittance lands during foreign-exchange market hours, the beneficiary should see the credit the same business day. To make that promise operational, the draft pushes two enablers:  

1. Straight-through processing so compliant payments clear without manual hops 

2. Near real-time nostro reconciliation, so operations teams aren’t waiting on end-of-day statements to release funds 

This, and a simple digital window to upload the document you’re asked for and track the status end-to-end to shrink the paperwork dead zone that borrowers know too well. 

If domestic payments taught India to expect immediacy, these norms extend that expectation to inbound flows. For households, it turns remittances into liquidity you can plan around. For MSMEs, it eases working-capital nerves when overseas invoices clear. For banks, it’s fewer exceptions, fewer callbacks, and a better customer promise.  

Credit card checkouts snap back...and how! 

Remember the lull throughout 2024 and early 2025? Tighter RBI guardrails on unsecured credit raised capital costs, issuers pulled back on aggressive growth, and loan growth cooled across personal/credit-card books. 

September changed the tone decisively because records got smashed and how. Total spends hit a record high of ₹2.17 trillion, marking a roughly 14% month-on-month rise over August. E-commerce continued to shoulder a large share, with spending being more than ₹1.44 lakh crore, while for point-of-sale devices was more than ₹72,000 crore. 

And it wasn’t just the same users spending more. New credit card additions neared 1.1 million in September, taking the total tally to 113.3 million. 

The timing helps explain the lift. Festive season promos unlocked discretionary demand and so did policy tailwinds like the recent GST tax cuts that filtered into pricing and offers. Together, they created a clean runway for higher-ticket purchases and a thicker layer of everyday swipes. 

None of this ignores risk. Unsecured credit still demands tight underwriting and early-bucket vigilance. But the September print looks less like a sugar rush and more like confidence returning to checkout. If this momentum keeps humming into October–November, some of this momentum should flow into Q3 numbers. 

Steady is about to become the signal for banks 

We’ve got remittance rails poised to speed up and credit-card usage getting stronger. The next question: can the core of India’s banking system hold steady while that plays out? S&P Global Market Intelligence says yes. 

Throughout the first nine months of 2025, total returns for large Indian banks lagged their strong 2024 showings. Geopolitics weighed on market sentiment in India and earlier interest rate cuts plus slower lending compressed net interest margins (NIMs). That squeeze showed up quarter after quarter.  

S&P’s latest report mentions that the outlook for Indian banks is set to improve in the fiscal starting April 1, 2026, with the slide in net interest margins (NIMs) halting—a small word with big implications for profitability and sentiment. The call rests on a few pillars: the worst of the margin compression from earlier rate cuts working through the system, deposit costs stabilising, and domestic demand doing more of the lifting. 

It feels like a needed reset. Through FY25–H1 FY26, banks felt the lag effect, loan yields rolled down faster than deposit costs could reprice, and quarterly results reflected the pressure. S&P’s read is that this dynamic eases into FY26, letting lenders breathe and budget. Some houses even see share-price upside for the big names (ICICI Bank Ltd., HDFC Bank Ltd. and State Bank of India) if margins settle and credit growth normalises, though that’s contingent on execution and mix. 

The impact? A pause in NIM declines turns the conversation from defence to delivery. That’s good for bank multiples, good for credit flow, and good for companies looking to fund the next leg of growth. 

This week’s highlights point toward a system learning to value time, usability, and stability together. All of it points to a more predictable cadence where rails, retail, and risk pricing reinforce each other. The Indian financial market is learning to move faster without getting noisier, and to be confident without being careless. 

That's a wrap for this week! I’ll see you again next week. As always, leaving you with a few reads to explore. Have a great weekend!  

Reading List: 

1. DLG 2025 has a hidden infrastructure problem for lenders and LSPs 

2. India Fintech Foundation asks govt, RBI to address concentration risk on UPI payments 

3. FDI inflows surge in fintech space on digital transformation push 

4. How digital public infrastructure is rewriting credit assessment for first-time borrowers 

Thank you for reading. If you liked this edition, forward it to your friends, peers, and colleagues. You can also connect with me on X here and follow FinBox on LinkedIn to always get all updates.  

Cheers,  

Mayank