Stable Money aims to triple fixed deposit assets to Rs 12,000 crore by 2026
The fintech firm, which started offering fixed deposits in August 2023, has grown its AUM to Rs 4,000 crore across 1.25 lakh deposits in just over two years, Saurabh Jain, Founder and CEO told YourStory.
“This is a trust business. Trust doesn’t get built by spending money and declaring victory,” said Jain. “It takes time, patience, and doing things right again and again. Once that trust starts compounding, the scale comes much faster than people expect.”
Stable Money joined the market at a time when fixed deposits were quietly becoming relevant again, helped by a rare mix of high interest rates, digital distribution, and a shift in investor behaviour from an equity-first approach.
Younger Indians in Tier II and III cities are now rediscovering FDs as a low-risk way to park money, drawn by small finance banks offering rates 200–300 basis points higher than large lenders and apps that have done away with tonnes of paperwork, branch visits, and savings-account lock-ins.
Platforms such as Stable Money, Super.money and CRED have made a traditionally dull product easier to use by offering a mobile-first experience with low minimum investments, UPI payments, and quick onboarding, while providing the same DICGC (Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation) insurance cover as bank deposits, which protects up to Rs 5 lakh per depositor per bank if a bank fails.
For banks, especially small finance banks, digital FDs have become a cost-efficient way to attract deposits at scale; for investors, they offer predictability at a time when markets feel volatile.
The result is a sudden revival of one of India’s oldest savings instruments, repackaged for a generation that values convenience as much as steady returns.
The median age of a Stable Money user is 28, with only about 13% of customers over 60, challenging the long-held view that fixed deposits are primarily a product for retirees.
Many of Stable Money’s older users are on the platform because their children have urged them to do so, said Jain.
According to him, in Tier II and III cities, trust in fixed deposits is already well established. What is changing is behaviour: customers are shifting the money they already hold with banks onto a single digital platform that is easier to track and manage.
The pitch is straightforward: access to multiple banks in one place, interest rates that are often 1 to 1.5 percentage points higher than large traditional banks, and features such as instant withdrawals and penalty-free premature exits on select deposits. Having said that, customers are not blindly chasing the highest rate, Jain said.
“Only about 40% of our FDs go into the highest-interest product,” he said.
“A lot of people are very specific. They’ll say, ‘I want a one-year FD,’ or ‘I want instant liquidity,’ and they’ll optimise for that rather than just the headline rate.”
This cautious mindset shapes how Stable Money is expanding beyond deposits. The company began offering corporate bonds about 14 months ago, positioning them as a natural progression for conservative savers, rather than a replacement for equity investing.
“Corporate bonds are still badly misunderstood in retail,” said Jain. “The real growth won’t come from stock or mutual fund investors experimenting. It will come from FD customers who see that there is a 2–3% pickup in return without suddenly taking equity-like risk.”
About 23% of Stable Money’s FD customers have already invested in bonds on the platform. However, Jain doesn’t expect bonds to overtake deposits anytime soon, pointing to the sheer scale of India’s fixed deposit market.
“Fixed deposits aren’t going anywhere,” he said. “But over time, the monthly inflows into bonds and FDs can start to look comparable.”
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The company has also added gold and silver exposure through mutual funds, rather than digital gold, citing regulatory clarity and alignment with its risk-averse audience.
“For many of our customers, gold behaves like fixed income in their heads,” Jain said. “They believe it only goes up over the long term, so 10–20% of their money naturally sits there. We’re just giving them a regulated way to do what they already want to do.”
Even as Stable Money positions itself as a digital-first platform, it is also experimenting with old-fashioned sales in pockets where trust is built face to face. The company has launched a pilot in Kolkata, deploying a small team to visit customers and help them book deposits, mirroring the relationship-manager model used by traditional banks.
“Kolkata has a very strong fixed-income culture, and trust matters a lot there,” Jain said. “If we can make this work in Kolkata, the learnings will travel. Digital works, but sometimes a physical conversation still moves the needle.”
Growth, for now, is being prioritised over near-term profitability. Jain said revenue will follow scale, especially once trust-driven compounding takes hold. Recently the startup raised $20 million in a series B round led by Nandan Nilekani’s Fundamentum.
“It took us about 14 months to build our first meaningful base of assets, but we’re now adding that same amount in roughly a month,” Jain reiterated. “That’s the effect of trust settling in. Once customers are comfortable, growth accelerates, which is why our priority right now is expanding assets and users rather than optimising for short-term revenue.”
Edited by Swetha Kannan
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