Ashneer Grover, former MD and co-founder of BharatPe, slammed RBI’s digital guidelines on Monday and called it one of the worst in the world for discouraging fintech firms from lending.  Taking to Twitter, the former Shark Tank India judge said, "If UPI is the best tech/regulatory innovation in the world, the RBI’s digital lending guidelines have to be the worst."  

If UPI is the best tech / regulatory innovation in the world, the RBI’s Digital Lending Guidelines have to be the worst. Essentially RBI is telling Fintechs ‘Bhai mat karo digital lending shending ! Banks se hoti nahi, humein samajh aati nahi, aur pen paper ki sale bhi kam hogi’

— Ashneer Grover (@Ashneer_Grover) September 5, 2022

  "Essentially, RBI is telling Fintechs ‘Bhai, mat karo digital lending shending! Banks se hoti nahi, humein samajh aati nahi, aur pen paper ki sale bhi kam hogi’ (Don't engage in lending via digital methods. Banks haven't been able to manage it well and we don't understand it)." However, a number of online users strongly disagreed with him, citing harassment from various fintech companies. Grover had also slammed RBI a few months ago over its directive to non-bank prepaid payment instruments to stop loading credit lines onto their products. “It’s a flex move by banks — rent seeking. But market is market and regulation will eventually come around to what market needs,” he added. Ashneer Grover had earlier called RBI's decision to allow credit cards to be linked with the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), "a great move", but he had his reservations regarding merchant discount rate (MDR). "Linking of credit cards on UPI is a great move by the RBI. Unfortunately, it’ll be a non-starter unless issuers, especially banks, understand that merchants will not pay MDR. So there is no interchange to be made on UPI," he had tweeted. "Merchants wouldn't want to pay for customer credit."