Introduction
Bajaj Finance's Insta Personal Loan lets pre-approved customers get money in their bank account within minutes, often without new documents. Speed is the product: a customer facing a medical bill or a wedding expense does not want to wait days. But instant digital lending is also a magnet for fraud, including account takeover, SIM-swap attacks, and mule accounts set up to receive loan proceeds.
The prompt: the fraud team proposes adding a mandatory step-up check (a selfie liveness check plus a bank account ownership verification) before every Insta Personal Loan disbursal. It would cut fraud but add 2–4 minutes and some drop-off. Should we do it? This is a classic lending PM trade-off, and interviewers use it to see whether a candidate can weigh revenue, losses, and customer harm in one frame rather than siding with whichever team spoke last.
Clarify, classify the trade-off, understand the product, form a hypothesis, choose metrics, design the experiment, plan analysis, set a decision framework, and recommend.
Step 1
Clarifying Questions (3 minutes)
Why it matters: We need to size the benefit. Expected answer: Fraud losses on Insta Personal Loans are small as a share of disbursals but have tripled in a year, mostly from account takeover. Impact on approach: Growing, concentrated threat.
Expected answer: The fraud team estimates 6–10% drop-off at the new step, based on similar checks elsewhere. Impact on approach: Large revenue risk if applied to everyone.
Expected answer: Older customers and users on low-end phones struggle with liveness checks.
Expected answer: Yes: device fingerprint, SIM change date, login location, bank account change history. Impact on approach: A risk-based approach is feasible.
Expected answer: RBI expects robust fraud risk management and disbursal only to the borrower's own account; no specific mandate for selfie checks.
Practice similar questions
Subscribe to access the full answer
.png){kind=logo}
