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Glossary
Lending, fund and controls terms, in plain English.
Short definitions for the words that come up in credit committees, fund operations and audits in India. Each one links to a longer guide where we have one.
Funds & AIFs
- Alternative Investment Fund (AIF)
- A privately pooled investment vehicle registered with SEBI under the AIF Regulations, 2012, that raises money from sophisticated investors and invests it under a defined policy.
- AIFs are registered in one of three categories, and the category decides what the fund can invest in and whether it can borrow.
- SEBI AIF reporting framework →
- Category I AIF
- An AIF that invests in areas the government treats as socially or economically desirable, such as start-ups, early-stage ventures, SMEs, social ventures and infrastructure.
- Category II AIF
- An AIF that does not fall in Category I or III and does not borrow except for day-to-day operational needs. Most private equity and private credit (debt) funds sit here.
- Private credit covenant monitoring →
- Category III AIF
- An AIF that uses diverse or complex trading strategies and may use leverage, including through listed or unlisted derivatives. Hedge-fund style strategies sit here.
- Private placement memorandum (PPM)
- The offer document an AIF gives prospective investors, setting out the strategy, fees, risks, governance and terms of the fund.
- Operations teams care about the PPM because every later promise to investors, from reporting to fee calculations, has to match it.
- Capital commitment
- The total amount an investor agrees to put into a fund over its life, drawn down in tranches rather than paid upfront.
- Drawdown notice (capital call)
- A formal notice from the fund manager asking investors to pay a portion of their committed capital by a set date, usually to fund a specific investment or expenses.
- The notice, the amounts per investor and the approval behind it all need to be traceable, because errors here go straight to investors.
- Management fee
- The annual fee a fund manager charges to run the fund, typically a percentage of commitments or invested capital as defined in the fund documents.
- Hurdle rate
- The minimum return investors must receive before the manager earns any share of profits (carried interest).
- Carried interest
- The manager’s share of the fund’s profits, paid only after investors have received their capital back and, usually, the hurdle return.
- Distribution waterfall
- The order in which a fund pays out cash: return of investor capital first, then the hurdle return, then any catch-up and carried interest to the manager.
- Investment committee (IC)
- The group that approves or rejects investment proposals for a fund, based on a memo prepared by the deal team.
- What regulators and LPs look for is evidence: who voted, on which version of the memo, with which conflicts declared.
- Investment committee workflow →
- AIF compliance officer
- The person a SEBI-registered AIF manager designates to monitor compliance with the AIF Regulations and SEBI circulars, and to report on it.
- NISM Series III-C for AIF compliance officers →
Lending & credit
- Non-banking financial company (NBFC)
- A company registered with the RBI that provides loans and other financial services but does not hold a banking licence and cannot accept demand deposits.
- NBFC credit approval workflow →
- Private credit
- Lending by non-bank investors, such as debt AIFs and private funds, directly to companies, usually through negotiated, non-traded loans or debentures.
- Alternative lending software →
- Venture debt
- Loans to venture-backed start-ups that complement equity funding, often with warrants that give the lender a small equity upside.
- Co-lending
- An arrangement in which two regulated lenders, typically a bank and an NBFC, jointly fund loans under a written agreement and RBI rules, with each keeping a share on its own books.
- RBI co-lending directions 2025 →
- Default loss guarantee (DLG)
- A contractual promise by one party, such as a lending service provider, to cover a lender’s losses on a loan portfolio up to a set limit. In digital lending the RBI caps DLG cover at 5% of the portfolio.
- Loan origination system (LOS)
- Software that takes a loan from application through checks, credit assessment and approval to sanction and disbursement.
- Term sheet
- A short, mostly non-binding document setting out the key commercial terms of a loan or investment before full legal documents are drafted.
- Credit sanction
- The formal approval of a loan by someone with the authority to approve it, recording the amount, terms and conditions.
- NBFC credit approval workflow →
- Condition precedent (CP)
- Something the borrower must deliver or satisfy before the lender will disburse, such as signed security documents or board resolutions.
- Condition subsequent (CS)
- Something the borrower must complete within an agreed period after disbursement, such as registering a charge.
- CS items are where tracking usually breaks: they live in a spreadsheet and nobody owns the reminder.
- Disbursement
- The actual release of sanctioned loan money to the borrower or to a designated account, after the conditions precedent are cleared.
- KYC (know your customer)
- The process of verifying a customer’s identity and assessing their risk before and during the relationship, as required under RBI and SEBI rules.
Controls & governance
- Maker-checker
- A control in which one person prepares a transaction or change and a different person must approve it before it takes effect.
- Maker-checker process explained →
- Four-eyes principle
- The rule that a sensitive action needs to be seen and approved by at least two people. Another name for maker-checker or dual control.
- Maker-checker process explained →
- Segregation of duties
- Splitting the steps of a sensitive process between different people so that no one person can both carry out and conceal an error or fraud.
- Credit committee
- The group that approves loans above the limits delegated to individuals, usually with a defined quorum, agenda and minutes.
- Audit trail
- A chronological record of who did what, when, and on which version of a record, kept so the history of a decision can be reconstructed.
- Audit trail requirements →
- Tamper-evident log
- A record built so that any later change to an entry can be detected, for example by chaining each entry to the one before it.
- Audit trail requirements →
- SLA escalation
- An automatic step that moves or flags a pending approval when it has waited longer than the agreed time.
Monitoring & risk
- Financial covenant
- A promise in a loan agreement that the borrower will keep a financial ratio, such as leverage or interest cover, within agreed limits, tested at set dates.
- Private credit covenant monitoring →
- Debt service coverage ratio (DSCR)
- Cash available for debt service divided by the principal and interest due in the same period. A DSCR below 1 means the borrower cannot meet its payments from operating cash.
- Covenant headroom
- How far a borrower’s actual ratio is from the covenant limit. Shrinking headroom is an early warning even before a breach.
- Covenant waiver
- A lender’s formal decision to excuse a covenant breach, usually for a period and sometimes for a fee or tighter terms.
- A waiver is a credit decision in its own right and should go through the same approval path as the original sanction.
- Early warning signals (EWS)
- Indicators, such as delayed payments, falling covenant headroom or adverse news, that suggest a borrower may be heading towards stress.
- Special mention account (SMA)
- The RBI classification for loans showing early stress: SMA-0 for overdues up to 30 days, SMA-1 for 31 to 60 days and SMA-2 for 61 to 90 days.
- Non-performing asset (NPA)
- A loan on which interest or principal has stayed overdue for more than 90 days, under RBI asset-classification norms.
- Portfolio monitoring
- The ongoing tracking of every loan or investment after it is made: payments, covenants, conditions, reports and early warning signals.
- Private credit covenant monitoring →
Technology & cyber
- Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
- The senior executive responsible for an organisation’s information and cybersecurity strategy and for enforcing its security policies.
- For middle layer and larger NBFCs, RBI’s 2026 directions say the CISO must not report to the Head of IT, must not carry business targets, and reports to the executive overseeing risk.
- RBI cybersecurity directions for NBFCs →
- DAKSH
- The Reserve Bank’s Advanced Supervisory Monitoring System, the RBI platform on which regulated entities submit supervisory information, including cyber incident reports.
- Under the 2026 directions, NBFCs in scope report cyber incidents on DAKSH within six hours of detection.
- RBI cybersecurity directions for NBFCs →
- IT Strategy Committee (ITSC)
- A committee that sets and reviews a company’s IT strategy and oversees IT governance, technology risk and IT outsourcing, reporting to the Board.
- RBI cybersecurity directions for NBFCs →
- Information systems (IS) audit
- An independent review of IT systems, controls and processes to find risks and check that controls work, reported to the Board or its Audit Committee.
- RBI cybersecurity directions for NBFCs →
- Recovery point objective (RPO)
- The point in time to which data must be recovered after an outage. In practice, how much recent data you can afford to lose.
- RBI cybersecurity directions for NBFCs →
- Recovery time objective (RTO)
- How long a system can stay in recovery after an outage before it seriously harms the business.
- RBI cybersecurity directions for NBFCs →
- Vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VA/PT)
- Two security tests: a vulnerability assessment systematically checks a system for weaknesses, and a penetration test has testers try to get past its security controls.
- RBI cybersecurity directions for NBFCs →
- Straight through processing (STP)
- Moving data from one process or application to the next automatically, with checks and an audit trail, and without anyone handling or editing it manually in between.
- Exporting from one system to a spreadsheet and re-uploading to another is the opposite of STP.
- RBI cybersecurity directions for NBFCs →
- Cyber crisis management plan (CCMP)
- A board-approved plan for detecting, responding to, recovering from and containing a cyber attack or major incident.
- RBI cybersecurity directions for NBFCs →
- Source code escrow
- An arrangement where a software vendor deposits its source code with a third party, to be released to the customer if the vendor fails or stops supporting the product.
- RBI cybersecurity directions for NBFCs →
Definitions are simplified for operations teams and are not legal or regulatory advice. Check the current SEBI and RBI text before relying on a specific threshold.
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