Why India’s RBI regulations blocked a direct equivalent? What Bilt Rewards teaches us about copying ideas across borders — and what actually travels.
A post about Ankur Jain has been doing the rounds on LinkedIn. You may have seen it: the young founder who “turned rent into rewards” and built a “$3.25 billion empire” while “landlords across America are nervous.”
The post gets the spirit right, and the facts appear to be wrong. The valuation is stale — Bilt raised $250 million in July 2025 at a $10.75 billion valuation, per Forbes, more than triple the figure in that post. And landlords are not nervous. They are investors. Blackstone, Starwood, AvalonBay, Equity Residential — America’s largest property owners put money into Bilt as early as its 2021 round, as TechCrunch reported at the time.
That second correction matters more than the first, because it points to what the viral version of the story misses entirely. And it is the key to answering a question I have been thinking about: could something like Bilt work in India?
The honest answer is uncomfortable, and more interesting than a simple yes.
What Bilt actually built: The consumer story is simple. Rent is the largest monthly expense for over 40 million American renter households, and until Bilt, it earned nothing — no points, no miles, no credit history. Bilt’s card lets renters pay rent with zero transaction fees and earn points redeemable for flights, hotels, fitness, even future home down payments.
But Jain himself told Fortune in May 2026 that the card is “less than 11%” of his business. The rest is a B2B platform sitting inside one in four US apartment buildings, processing over $100 billion in annual housing payments, with revenue projected to cross $1 billion by early 2026 — up from roughly $200 million in 2024.
The real pitch was never to renters. It was to property managers: join our alliance, pay nothing, and I will make your tenants pay on time and never want to leave. Tenant churn is expensive — vacancy, brokerage, repainting, lost rent. Bilt monetised the savings. Fifteen of the top twenty US property owners signed up.
So the two-sided structure is the actual invention. Renters get rewards. Landlords get retention. Bilt sits in the middle earning processing fees on rent, referral fees from property managers and mortgage lenders, annual fees on its premium cards, and — most importantly — standard card interchange of around 2.2% whenever members use the card for everyday spending.
Hold that last number. It decides the India question.
Even in America, the maths was hard: A detail the viral posts never mention: the original economics nearly broke. The Wall Street Journal reported in June 2024 that Wells Fargo, Bilt’s issuing bank, was losing as much as $10 million a month on the card — because savvy users paid rent, made a few token purchases to qualify for points, and generated almost no interchange revenue.
That partnership ended. In January 2026, Bilt launched “Card 2.0” — three cards at $0, $95 and $495 annual fees, issued by Column N.A. with Cardless — shifting revenue towards subscription fees and everyday spending, and extending rewards to mortgage payments for the first time.
One design choice here is worth every business reader’s attention. Even on Bilt’s cards, rent and mortgage payments are pulled directly from the member’s bank account — they never touch the credit line.
Bilt is a rewards overlay on what is effectively a debit transaction. It is not lending anyone their EMI. That distinction is the whole trick, and it is why the model survived regulatory scrutiny in the US.
India already ran this experiment. The RBI ended it: Here is the part that makes this a genuinely instructive case study rather than another founder-worship story. India had its own version of rewards-on-rent. For several years, CRED, RedGirraffe, Paytm, PhonePe and others let tenants pay rent by credit card for a 1–2% convenience fee — earning points, hitting milestone targets, enjoying 45 days of float. It became one of the fastest-growing use cases in Indian fintech.
Then the regulator moved. In March 2024, PhonePe, Paytm, Amazon Pay, Freecharge and Mobikwik withdrew credit-card rent payments. And under the RBI’s updated Payment Aggregator guidelines, effective 15 September 2025, the remaining players, including CRED, exited too.
The RBI’s logic: only merchants with a direct contractual agreement with a payment aggregator can receive card payments — and your landlord is not a registered merchant. The regulator also flagged KYC gaps and the obvious misuse: reward-point arbitrage, money rotation, and inflated rent receipts for HRA claims.
Banks had read the wind even earlier. Most major issuers had already stripped reward points from rent transactions and imposed a roughly 1% processing fee on them.
So a straight Bilt clone in India runs into four structural walls:
The economics don’t exist. Bilt’s rewards are funded by America’s ~2.2% interchange pool. In India, UPI carries zero MDR and card MDR is thin and politically sensitive. There is no fee pool to fund meaningful rewards on rent — which is why Indian fintechs charged the tenant instead, inverting Bilt’s entire promise.
The supply side is fragmented. Bilt works because US rentals are institutionally owned — single companies managing tens of thousands of units on common software platforms. India’s rental market is overwhelmingly individual landlords, many of whom prefer not to have a digital trail. There is no one to sell the retention pitch to.
The regulator sees risk, not inclusion. The RBI looked at credit-card rent payments and saw leverage, arbitrage and laundering pathways — not underserved renters.
EMIs on credit cards are a non-starter. Paying a secured home loan with unsecured revolving credit is debt stacked on debt. No Indian bank permits it, and no Indian regulator should. Remember: even Bilt does not do this.
What actually travels: Business models rarely cross borders intact. Problems do.
Strip Bilt to its transferable ideas — reward the largest recurring payment, make the payee fund it because it improves their economics, and build credit history as a by-product — and several India-native versions look genuinely viable.
Rent as credit history, without the card. The most regulator-friendly piece of Bilt is credit building. Verified rent payments via UPI autopay or NACH, reported to CIBIL and Experian, helping young renters qualify for cheaper home loans — funded by lender referral fees, needing no interchange at all. RedGirraffe pitched a version of this with SBI Card back in 2017, promising stronger credit scores and home loans cheaper by up to 1% annually. The rails have changed; the idea remains sound.
Loyalty for organised rentals. Co-living and managed accommodation operators — the Stanza Livings and Colives — are registered merchants, so the RBI’s rules don’t block them, and they face exactly the churn problem American property managers do. A retention programme funded from their vacancy savings is a faithful, legal translation of Bilt — for the organised sliver of the market.
Society maintenance as the recurring payment. Platforms like MyGate and NoBrokerHood already sit on recurring payments to registered RWA merchants. A neighbourhood-merchant-funded rewards layer there maps neatly onto India’s gated communities — and mirrors Bilt’s own expansion into “neighbourhood commerce” across its 45,000-plus merchant network.
Lender-funded EMI loyalty. The viable EMI version is not paying EMIs with a card. It is the bank rewarding on-time EMI behaviour — points, fee waivers, rate step-downs — because punctual borrowers are cheaper to service and harder to poach at refinancing time. Same incentive alignment, zero regulatory friction.
The lesson: Bilt is an interchange-economics business wearing a rewards costume. India’s payment economics and rental structure cannot support the costume. But the body underneath — credit building, retention economics, payee-funded loyalty — fits India perfectly well.
That, I think, is the discipline worth taking from this story. When we see a billion-dollar model abroad, the question is never “can we copy this?” It is “which problem was this actually solving, who was actually paying for it, and do both exist here?”
Ankur Jain answered those three questions for America. Someone will answer them for India. It just won’t look like Bilt.
