Part 1: He was told becoming a CA meant life was settled.
Everyone told Jinand Shah, “Once you clear CA, you’re done. Life’s sorted.”
It’s almost a cultural mantra in India, a promise of security after endless exams.
But the day Jinand cleared CA, he realized life doesn’t end there. It begins there.
He started working with his father in Bhavnagar, where his days revolved around project finance: writing reports, meeting entrepreneurs and visiting banks for small-business loans.
He saw entrepreneurs spend months chasing a ₹20 lakh loan for businesses having cash flows (with limited collateral security), where bankers treated them like an inconvenience.
That’s when a thought struck him. “A kirana shop owner smiles even when someone buys one candy,” he recalls. “But a small business owner isn’t welcomed in a bank, even though that’s the bank’s real business.”
He saw people carry 100-page files, sit for hours and hear: “Come again next week.” It made no sense. These were real people running real businesses, not files to be shuffled.
When Jinand asked senior professionals why MSME finance worked this way, they all said, “That’s how it’s always been. It’s relationship-based, not process-based.”
But he wasn’t convinced. He hadn’t studied CA and CFA to learn what tea a banker likes. He wanted to understand what data the banker needs to say yes.
That question became the seed of OPL.
Back then, automating MSME finance was considered impossible. But Jinand’s logic was simple, “If lending is predictable enough to reject, it’s predictable enough to approve.”
In 2015, he stopped questioning and started building. He took his savings, formed a six-member team, and spent 18 months sitting inside bank branches collecting forms, studying processes, noting what each bank truly looked for.
That research turned into their first prototype that eventually evolved into the ‘one-form concept’. One form that could talk to every bank.
Everyone said, “This will never work.”
That’s when Jinand knew he had to make it work.
Part 2: They gave him 200 reasons he’d fail. He took them as 200 free lessons.
In 2017, a large private bank’s tech team reviewed OPL’s platform and sent back a 200-point note on what wouldn’t work.
Two hundred reasons.
The team panicked but Jinand smiled and said, “When a giant gives you a 200-point audit for free, you’re not being criticized, you’re being mentored.”
They fixed every single point. That process gave him something priceless: a view from the lender’s lens.
By 2018, the persistence paid off. SIDBI led a consortium of PSU banks (SBI, PNB, Bank of Baroda, and Indian Bank) to invest in OPL. Together, they took a majority stake.
Many said he was crazy to give up control. But Jinand believed “A small piece of a big pie is better than owning 100% of a small one.”
That partnership changed everything.
It powered the technology backbone of PSB Loans in 59 Minutes – India’s first digital platform that connected GST, I-T and credit data to banks in real time.
Before this, MSME loans took weeks or months. Now, a small business in Rajkot could apply, upload and receive sanction within an hour.
When the platform was launched nationally, first, by the Finance Minister and then by the Prime Minister, Jinand wasn’t in the spotlight. He was at the back, watching dashboards, silently praying that the system his team had been relentlessly building should run flawlessly.
His father was in the front row. For the first time, he understood what his son had been building all those years. He didn’t need to know APIs or workflows, seeing the Prime Minister launch it was enough. That day, Jinand realised they hadn’t just built a company.
They had built trust and new way of doing business for thousands of MSMEs who had never been given a fair shot.
Part 3: He doesn’t look for easy problems. He looks for the impossible ones.
From 2018 onward, OPL stopped thinking like a startup and started acting like an infrastructure.
Today, its investors (shareholders) include SIDBI, SBI, PNB, Bank of Baroda, Indian Bank, HDFC Bank, NABARD, MUDRA, TransUnion, CRISIL and HSBC. These are the best players in every segment of the Banking Sector, you may say.
Although OPL has facilitated over ₹2 lakh crore in loans, Jinand still says they’re just getting started.
What sets OPL apart is its evolution from loan automation to intelligent credit infrastructure. Its flagship AI and ML-based solution, MSME Rank, helps banks predict borrower health and identify early-warning signals. It reads data from GST, financials and bank statements to estimate the probability of default months in advance.
In simple terms, it helps banks see tomorrow not just yesterday.
“In finance,” he says, “trust is the hardest currency. Lose that, and no algorithm can save you.”
Headquartered in Ahmedabad, OPL continues to quietly build India’s next-gen digital infrastructure and empowering MSMEs, RRBs and lenders across the country.
For young founders, Jinand’s advice is clear:
“Forget the glamour. Focus on the gap. Listen more than you pitch.
And when the world says ‘it can’t be done’, that’s your green light.”
