Client Ambition

Our client, a health-fintech firm offering medical loans to patients at the point of care (along with its investor, British International Investment), aimed to extend affordable healthcare financing to lower-income families beyond India’s metros. With most of its loan requests coming from four Tier 1 cities, this required a go-to-market model suited to the thinner hospital margins, informal incomes, and limited credit histories of Tier 2 markets.

Our Solution

We partnered with our client across two phases, first to generate insights for a Tier 2 go-to-market strategy, and then to support its pilot in Indore and Lucknow.

In 2024, we analysed over 2,400 loan applications across 14 cities and consulted 80 stakeholders across 18 hospitals in Bengaluru, Chennai, Mysuru, and Indore. We segmented private hospitals, mapped the patient journey from pre-admission to discharge, assessed the competitive landscape, and designed a 12-month pilot model anchored on chain hospitals and supported by standalone hospitals.

In 2025, we supported the pilot as it built a hospital network from zero. We helped refine the hospital onboarding process and pitch, and evolved the commercial model through three iterations based on hospital feedback. We also developed seven stakeholder personas, a patient journey map with clear intervention points, and supported a toolkit of over 20 assets, including pitch decks, messaging scripts, training content, and an evidence-based target-setting model.

Finally, we synthesised pilot learnings into a playbook and six recommendations to guide expansion into new Tier 2 cities.

Results

The engagement helped the client move from experiment to a scalable Tier 2 playbook. Over the 2025-26 financial year, the pilot signed eight hospitals across two new cities. Overall, the engagement validated a commercially viable model for patient financing in Tier 2 India, with a clear roadmap for scaling to new cities.