Ram Fincorp lent ₹26,901 but demands ₹42,622 — its own KFS discloses a 173% APR

A salaried borrower in Bengaluru received ₹26,901 in their bank account from Ram Fincorp. The amount Ram Fincorp now demands back is ₹42,622 — repayable as six monthly instalments of ₹7,103.

That gap is not a number a recovery agent invented under pressure. It is set out in the company's own Key Facts Statement (KFS) — the standardised disclosure the Reserve Bank of India requires every lender to hand you before you borrow — which states an interest rate of 120% per annum and an Annual Percentage Rate (APR) of 173.39%.

Ram Fincorp is the lending brand operated by R.K. Bansal Finance Pvt Ltd, a non-banking financial company (NBFC) registered with the Reserve Bank of India. That fact is the whole point of this article. This is not a story about an unlicensed app run from overseas — the Government of India has already blocked 600+ predatory digital-lending apps and the RBI has issued repeated advisories about those. This is about what a registered, regulated NBFC put in its own paperwork, and what that paperwork means for the borrower who signed it on a phone screen in a few seconds.

How to check Ram Fincorp on the RBI register yourself

Before anything else, you can confirm what you are dealing with — for free, in a few minutes.

The RBI publishes a public "List of NBFCs registered with the Reserve Bank of India" and a separate "List of NBFCs whose Certificate of Registration (CoR) has been cancelled." Search the operating company's legal name — here, R.K. Bansal Finance Pvt Ltd, not the app name "Ram Fincorp." A lending brand on an app store is marketing; the entity that actually holds the RBI registration and lends you the money is the company named in the loan agreement and the KFS.

When you find the entry, compare the registered particulars against what the company uses in its loan documents: the exact corporate name, the Corporate Identification Number (CIN), the registered office address, and the registered email. Across this sector, a recurring red flag is an NBFC that has filed a personal Gmail or Yahoo address as its RBI-registered corporate email — a small detail that tells you how seriously the entity treats its obligations. A mismatch between the registered address and the address recovery messages come from is worth noting too. None of this makes a loan void, but every discrepancy is evidence you can attach to a complaint.

The headline to hold onto: confirming that Ram Fincorp is registered does not mean its conduct is beyond question. A licence to lend is not a licence to overcharge through undisclosed deductions, and it is certainly not a licence to harass.

What a Key Facts Statement must tell you

The KFS exists precisely so that a number like 173.39% cannot hide. Under the RBI's rules, before you take the loan the lender must give you a KFS that discloses, in plain terms:

• the loan amount and the net amount actually disbursed to you after any deductions;
• the interest rate and the all-in Annual Percentage Rate (APR) — the single figure meant to capture the true annual cost including fees;
• every fee and charge — processing fee, any insurance, and the like;
• the total amount repayable and the repayment schedule;
• the penal charges for late payment, shown separately; and
• the grievance-redress contact and the cooling-off / look-up period.

If a charge is not in your KFS, the lender had to disclose it and did not — and that is exactly the kind of charge you can dispute. So read your own KFS line by line. In Ram Fincorp's, the cost is not buried: 120% per annum and an APR of 173.39% are stated outright. The problem is not that the number is hidden; it is what the number does to a small loan.

The arithmetic of a 173% APR

You do not need to be a finance professional to feel the weight of these figures — the cost is just arithmetic, and you can do it yourself.

When the headline interest rate is 120% a year, the loan is roughly doubling in cost over twelve months before any penalty is added. Put differently, 1% a day is about 365% a year before penalties — so even a rate that sounds smaller per day compounds into something enormous over a full year. An APR of 173.39% is higher than the 120% "interest rate" because the APR is designed to fold in the fees and the timing of repayments, not just the headline rate. That is the number to trust, because it is the one closest to the real cost.

There is a second, quieter mechanism that pushes the effective cost above even the printed APR. Across this sector, lenders often deduct 10–12% of the loan upfront — as a "processing fee" or similar — and then charge interest on the full sanctioned amount, including the slice the borrower never received. When interest runs on money that never reached your account, the rate you actually pay on the money you could use is higher than any figure on the page. Always check your KFS for the difference between the sanctioned amount and the net amount disbursed, and ask yourself what the interest is being charged on.

This is the same pattern documented across the wider investigation into RBI-registered "instant loan" NBFCs — see also a separate single-repayment loan-app case and a documented daily-interest case in the same series, each built from the lender's own disclosures.

Know your rights

Whatever a loan costs on paper, taking it does not place you outside the law's protection. Under the RBI Fair Practices Code and the Digital Lending Directions, a regulated lender and its recovery agents cannot:

• call you before 8 a.m. or after 7 p.m.;
• contact your employer, family, friends or references, or disclose your debt to them;
• use abuse, threats, intimidation or public shaming of any kind;
• hide the cost — the APR must be disclosed in the Key Facts Statement before you borrow;
• recover the money by anything other than lawful means.

And the accountability does not vanish into an outsourced call-centre: the RBI is explicit that the Regulated Entity is accountable for the conduct of its recovery agents. If an agent acting for Ram Fincorp crosses a line, the registered NBFC behind it answers for it.

Crucially, inability to repay a loan is, by itself, a civil matter. You cannot be jailed simply for being unable to pay, and a recovery agent who threatens "arrest" over a defaulted personal loan is using unlawful pressure that itself breaches the Code. Distinct situations — a dishonoured cheque, or actual fraud — can carry their own separate consequences, so this is general information, not a blanket promise; but the everyday threat of jail for non-payment of a loan like this one is intimidation, not law. Save that message. It is evidence.

How to report it

If a lender has crossed these lines, the channels below are free and official. You never need to pay anyone to use them.

• RBI Sachet — sachet.rbi.org.in — to report an entity or an unlawful lending practice.
• RBI Ombudsman / Centralised Receipt and Processing Centre (CRPC) — for a complaint against a regulated NBFC, after you have first raised it in writing with the lender's grievance officer and waited 30 days without satisfactory resolution.
• National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal — cybercrime.gov.in — and the helpline 1930 — for data exposure, blackmail, or harassment that has crossed into criminal conduct.
• Consumer commission — you also have the right to approach a consumer commission for deficiency in service or an unfair trade practice, including charges that were never properly disclosed.

A practical order helps. First, write to Ram Fincorp's grievance officer — named in the KFS — and put your dispute and your instruction in writing: communicate only with you, only in writing, only within lawful hours. Start the 30-day clock. In parallel, log the entity on RBI Sachet. If at any point your data is exposed or you are threatened, go straight to cybercrime.gov.in or 1930 without waiting on the others.

Keep your evidence: the Key Facts Statement, every email, every call log, and every screenshot. They are what turn a complaint into a case. Note the difference between the amount that reached your account and the amount demanded — that gap, read against the KFS, is often the heart of the dispute. The cases in the wider investigation succeed or fail on exactly this kind of contemporaneous record.

These are the rights of every borrower, registered NBFC or not. Ram Fincorp's own KFS shows the cost in black and white; the law shows you what to do about how it is collected. You are not powerless, and you are not alone.

Right of reply: any company named here may submit a factual correction or response through our right-of-reply channel, and we will publish it.