India’s affordable housing finance market is projected to grow from USD 3.9 billion in 2025 to USD 16.5 billion by 2033, a near-fivefold expansion driven by rising aspirations and a generation of first-time borrowers in Tier 2, Tier 3, and even Tier 4 cities entering formal credit for the first time. For housing finance companies, this is the opportunity of a decade. It is also the test that will expose, at scale and in public, which organisations have genuinely transformed and which have only digitised.
Digitisation Is Not Modernisation, and the Difference Is About to Matter
The home loan process has changed visibly over the last five years. What used to take 20 to 25 days now takes 7 to 8 in a digitised workflow. Forms are online. KYC is digital. Bank statements arrive through Account Aggregator rather than couriered folders. From the outside, this looks like transformation.
Smita Jain, Regional Vice President of Financial Services at Salesforce, draws the distinction the sector rarely makes explicitly, in a recent episode of the Great India Industry Transformation podcast: “Digitisation is really nothing but you take a piece of paper and you put it on the screen. The process largely remains unchanged and it is just maybe faster typing.” Modernisation is structurally different. It means redefining the workflow itself: bringing every internal department — sales, underwriting, service, credit, operations — onto a single platform where a customer’s information, given once, flows to every team without the customer repeating it. The experience changes. The scalability changes. And the failure mode changes.
Jain frames the test precisely: “A very simple tell for any organisation is you ask a very simple question: if the volumes or the business has to really triple tomorrow, what would break?” Digitised processes almost certainly would. Modernised ones are built to withstand exactly that.
Why This Distinction Matters Now
More than 60% of affordable housing borrowers today are new to formal credit. The growth of this sector is not happening in markets with established borrower infrastructure. It is happening in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities, among self-employed borrowers whose incomes are real but irregular, and among families for whom this loan is the single most significant financial commitment of their lives. These borrowers arrive with expectations shaped not by prior lending relationships but by every consumer digital experience they have had. And they are arriving in volumes that will stress-test every lender’s operations.
For a housing finance company that has digitised but not modernised, that volume is an exposure. For one that has rebuilt its workflows on a connected, scalable platform, it is the moment the investment pays back.
What Modernisation Actually Looks Like
Dinesh Gangwani, President and CTO at Truhome Finance Limited, describes the internal architecture of a modern home loan in a way that makes this concrete. Think of it as a sandwich, he says: people at the top, still essential for underwriting judgment; automation at the base, handling India Stack integrations, KYC, bank statements, and document verification; and AI binding everything together in the middle. The governing principle, Gangwani says, is to let the complexity stay inside the sandwich and let the customer see only what it is designed to look like: simple.
Salesforce for Financial Services provides the platform layer that makes this possible, bringing sales, service, underwriting, and operations onto a single connected system where every team works from the same customer record. MuleSoft sits beneath it as the integration layer, what Gangwani describes as “the nervous system to Salesforce’s brain”, pulling KYC documents, PAN, Aadhaar, income verification, and property records from siloed systems into a single automated call.
A job that once required manually logging into five separate systems now happens in one. Tableau gives leadership real-time visibility into where applications are stalling, which regions are performing, and where risk is building in the portfolio, replacing the quarterly report with a live operational view that enables proactive decisions rather than reactive ones.
The AI Layer That Only Works on a Modernised Foundation
AI in housing finance is an accelerant, not a starting point. Its value depends entirely on what sits underneath it. Gangwani’s current priorities at Truhome illustrate this directly. The first use case is native language processing: converting spoken regional language inputs into structured data that prefills Salesforce workflows automatically. It sounds like a feature. It is actually a gateway. A loan journey that only functions in English is a loan journey that excludes the borrower it was designed to serve.
The second use case is AI-assisted tools for the partner ecosystem: giving field teams instant access to knowledge that previously required escalation to a central function, so decisions happen at the point of customer contact. Both are only possible because the platform beneath them is modernised: structured, connected, and built to carry AI output reliably. The foundation is not a technical prerequisite but the entire point.
To hear how Truhome Finance is navigating this in practice, including the platform decisions, the AI roadmap, and what genuine modernisation looks like at the scale India’s affordable housing sector demands, watch the Great India Industry Transformation podcast featuring Dinesh Gangwani, President and CTO at Truhome Finance Limited, and Smita Jain, Regional Vice President of Financial Services at Salesforce.
