Executive Dossier

Do’s and Don’ts for Getting a Personal Loan

Published

3 years ago

February 9, 2023

MUMBAI: Personal loans enable both salaried and self-employed individuals to meet their short to medium term financial obligations without having to furnish any collateral or security. As individuals looking for a personal loan have several options to choose from, they may have a difficult time in selecting the right lender for their personal loan. The chances of availing approval for personal loans may increase or decrease depending on the loan applicants’ financial behaviour. Moreover, these actions may also end up having long-term consequences on the financial health of the prospective borrowers. Hence, it is important for prospective borrowers to understand more about personal loans before they opt for this unsecured credit instrument. Here are some do’s and don’ts for personal loan applicants as well as for existing personal loan borrowers:

Do’s for Availing Personal Loans

Compare the interest rates offered by various personal loan lenders

The interest rates offered on personal loans usually start from 10.49% p.a., with some public sector banks offering lower rates of interest on their personal loan schemes. Prospective borrowers should first check the personal loan interest rates with banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFC) with whom they share a deposit, credit card or lending relationship. Then they should visit online financial marketplaces to compare the interest rates on personal loans offered by other lenders based on their credit profile. These financial marketplaces also allow loan applicants to apply for personal loan online with their partner lenders.

Select your loan tenure after factoring your EMI affordability

The loan tenures offered by most personal loan lenders extend up to 5 years, with some lenders also offering tenures of up to 7 years. Opting for longer loan tenures will lower the EMI amount but increase the overall interest cost while shorter repayment tenures will reduce the total interest costs but increase the EMI. Thus, personal loan applicants should use the online personal loan EMI calculator to find their optimum loan tenures and EMI based on their finances. Loan applicants should also account for their unavoidable monthly expenditures and monthly contribution towards their crucial financial goals while selecting their optimal EMIs.

Keep your EMI/NMI Ratio within 50-55%

EMI/NMI ratio is the sum total of an individual’s total EMI obligations (including the EMI of their proposed personal loan) as a proportion of their net monthly income (NMI). Lenders offering personal loans usually consider this factor as an important indicator of their repayment capacity. Lenders usually prefer lending to loan applicants with total EMIs within the limit of 50-55% of their net monthly income. Those exceeding this limit have lower chances of personal loan approval. Thus, loan applicants can use the Personal Loan EMI Calculator to find out whether their EMI/NMI ratio, after factoring in the EMI of the proposed personal loan, is within the desired range. Applicants exceeding the above mentioned limit can select longer loan tenures to increase their chances of loan approval.

Check the total cost of availing a personal loan

Although interest rates play a vital role in deciding the overall cost of opting for a personal loan, there are other fees and charges associated with a personal loan which can inflate the overall cost. As a prospective borrower, you should be aware of the processing fees, prepayment charges and other expenses levied by lenders under their personal loan schemes and opt for the lender with the lowest total cost for availing a personal loan after factoring their interest rates, processing fees and other charges.

Check the eligibility criteria

Although every lender offering personal loan has their own eligibility conditions, lenders usually offer personal loans on the basis of their loan applicants’ income, credit scores, existing financial obligations, employment profile, etc. Therefore, loan applicants should check if they meet the eligibility criteria set by a particular lender before they apply for a personal loan. Failure to meet the eligibility conditions may result in loan rejection and negatively impact their credit score. Instead, loan applicants should visit online financial marketplaces, which provides loan offers to the applicants on the basis of their credit profile and loan eligibility matrix set by the individual lenders.

Don’ts for Availing Personal Loans

Don’t ignore your credit score

Credit scores are a numerical indicator of an individual’s creditworthiness. Lenders use this score to determine their applicants’ repayment capacity. Applicants with lower scores may be denied loan approval or they may get loan sanction at higher interest rates. Thus, loan applicants should regularly track their credit scores by fetching their credit report and take corrective steps to improve their credit scores. Fetching their credit report will allow applicants to check for any clerical errors or incorrect information present in the report and rectify those errors. A rectified credit report will increase the loan applicant’s credit score and thereby, improve their personal loan eligibility.

Don’t apply with multiple lenders within a short duration

Whenever you apply for a new personal loan, the lender fetches your credit report from the credit bureaus in order to assess your creditworthiness. Credit bureaus consider such credit report requests from lenders as hard inquiries, which leads the bureau to reduce your credit score by a few points. Therefore, multiple such inquiries within a short span of time will sharply reduce your credit score, thus reducing your chances of availing personal loans.

Loan applicants should instead visit online financial marketplaces if they want to make multiple such loan inquiries. Such credit report requests from financial marketplaces are considered as soft inquiries, which do not reduce your credit scores.

Don’t skip EMI payments

Lenders usually charge late payment fees if you miss your EMI repayment deadline. Although the lender might offer an extension under certain circumstances, borrowers usually have to pay the penal interest rates on failure to repay their EMI. As the repayment history of an individual receives the highest weightage while calculating their credit score, non-payment of EMIs by their due date may also end up in reducing their credit scores, which in turn would reduce their future loan and credit card eligibility. Thus, personal loan borrowers should always try to pay their EMIs by their due date.

Don’t borrow from unrecognised lenders

Loan applicants should exercise caution while checking personal loan offers from multiple lenders. There are many unrecognised platforms which may promise lower interest rates or other favourable conditions on their personal loans. However, such unscrupulous lenders may steal your personal information or they may have other hidden charges which will end up ballooning your borrowing costs. Therefore, prospective borrowers should always apply for personal loans with lenders recognised by the RBI having good customer reviews and reliable lending history.

Executive Dossier

Game on, fame on as Good Game hunts India’s first global gaming star

Published

2 weeks ago

January 27, 2026

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Game faces on, pressure high India’s gaming ambitions are levelling up. Good Game, billed as the world’s first as-live global gaming reality show, has officially launched in India with a bold mission: to crown the country’s first Global Gaming Superstar.

Blending esports with mainstream entertainment, the show brings together competitive gaming, creativity and on-camera performance in a format that tests more than just joystick skills. Contestants will be judged on gameplay, screen presence and their ability to perform under pressure, reflecting how gaming has evolved from pastime to profession and pop culture currency.

Fronting the show are three high-profile ambassadors: actor and entrepreneur Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Indian cricket star Rishabh Pant, and gaming creator Ujjwal Chaurasia. The winner will take home Rs 1 crore ($100,000) among the largest prize pools for any Indian reality show along with the chance to represent India on a global stage.

Backed by a planned annual investment of up to Rs 100 crore, Good Game is also courting brand partners, promising a minimum reach of 500 million among India’s core youth audience. The creators position the show as a bridge between entertainment and interactive culture, offering long-format content, community engagement and commercial scale.

Auditions are now open to Indian citizens aged 18 and above, inviting amateur and professional gamers, creators and performers alike. Shortlisted candidates will be called for in-person auditions in Mumbai on 14 and 15 February, and in Delhi on 28 February and 1 March 2026.

With big money, big names and even bigger ambition, Good Game signals a shift in how India views gaming not just as play, but as performance, profession and prime-time spectacle.

Digital

SpotDraft hires new CMO and CFO to fuel global push for its AI contract platform

Published

2 months ago

December 3, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

INDIA: SpotDraft has strengthened its senior ranks as it gears up for faster global expansion, naming Alon Waks as chief marketing officer and Amit Sharma as chief financial officer. The appointments follow the firm’s $54 million Series B round earlier this year and mark a push to scale across the Americas, EMEA and India.

The AI-powered contract-lifecycle-management platform has posted 100 per cent year-on-year growth in customer acquisition, counting Apollo.io, IPSY, Mixpanel, Oyster and Panasonic among its global clients. The firm processes more than one million contracts annually, with volumes up 173 per cent and nearly 50,000 monthly active users.

Waks, a veteran of Kustomer, Bizzabo, CreatorIQ, LivePerson and ZoomInfo, will steer global marketing and category positioning as legal teams adopt AI-driven tools. Sharma, who has led finance across scaling tech firms since 2016, will guide financial strategy, investor relations and market expansion.

Both hires aim to sharpen SpotDraft’s bid for a larger slice of the fast-growing legal-tech market, expected to exceed $63 billion by 2032. Co-founder and chief executive Shashank Bijapur said the company is focused on scaling go-to-market operations in the Americas, deepening leadership in EMEA, and accelerating AI capabilities for general counsels and legal-operations leaders.

Clients report shorter deal cycles and better alignment between legal and business teams. “What used to take weeks now happens in days,” said Abnormal Security senior legal operations manager Susan Koenig. DeepL head of legal operations André Barrow, said SpotDraft has helped reframe legal “from a cost centre to a generator of revenue”.

Executive Dossier

Outdoor Ads Get Smarter as LOC8 Shifts OOH from Visibility to Attention

Published

3 months ago

November 28, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Out-of-home ads were once the wallflowers of marketing seen by everyone, noticed by few. But in an age where attention has become the world’s most fought-over currency, even billboards are getting a brain upgrade. Enter LOC8, OSMO’s AI-powered attention engine, quietly reshaping the old OOH playbook by measuring not just who could have looked at an ad, but who actually did. The shift is subtle but seismic: impressions are out, impact is in and data, not gut instinct, is calling the shots.

In a landscape where marketers question every rupee spent outdoors, LOC8 is turning lampposts, flyovers and traffic islands into precision-mapped attention laboratories. By crunching dwell time, visibility zones, perceptual size and real-world obstructions, the platform is dragging OOH into a future where creativity meets computer vision and where the best ideas aren’t just eye-catching, but eye-measured. From automotive facelifts to FMCG novelty and real estate trust-building, the message is clear, outdoor has stopped shouting and started listening. Indian Television Dot Com explores more about it in an Interview interview with OSMO co-founder Nipun Arora.

On how OSMO is shifting outdoor advertising from a visibility-led medium to an attention-led one through LOC8.

Traditional OOH has long been measured by visibility and impressions i.e how many people could see an ad. OSMO, through its proprietary AI platform LOC8, is shifting that narrative more towards likelihood of being noticed. Using computer vision and machine learning, LOC8 analyzes real-world video data to measure visibility zones, obstructions, dwell time and perceptual size; bringing precision to how attention is quantified outdoors. It moves the focus from mere impressions to quality of impressions, making OOH a data-verified, attention-led medium comparable to digital in accountability.

On how marketers can use LOC8’s dwell-time, visibility and perception insights to craft more effective, emotionally resonant OOH campaigns.

LOC8 helps brands understand how people truly experience outdoor media how long they look, from what distance, and under what conditions. By quantifying dwell time, visibility duration, and perceptual size; marketers can plan campaigns that align with real human viewing behavior. This empowers creative and strategy teams to design emotionally resonant storytelling where messaging, visual hierarchy and placement are optimized for how people actually notice and process OOH creatives.

About what LOC8 has revealed through campaigns like Renault Triber and Namaste India on how categories such as auto, FMCG and real estate use attention metrics to drive outcomes.

Each category uses attention data differently but all share one common goal: to convert outdoor visibility into measurable engagement.

• Automotive | Renault Triber

For the new Renault Triber facelift, bold creative met data-led planning through LOC8. By analyzing on-ground video data, LOC8 measured real audience attention across placements factoring in visibility zones, obstructions, traffic speed and perceptual size. This enabled Renault to identify corridors that delivered maximum reach, saliency and engagement, optimizing media efficiency and ROI.

• FMCG | Namaste India

In OOH, innovation is the hook and assets are the bait. But bait often hides the hook. With Loc8’s attention metrics, we ensured the bait wasn’t a hurdle, rather it became the perfect stage for innovation to deliver its full impact! The insight proved that creative novelty, when validated by attention data, drives deeper engagement and measurable brand lift.

• Real Estate

For luxury and real estate campaigns targeting HNI/UHNI audiences, attention patterns differ especially between front and rear passengers, who are often the core audience segment for premium sites. LOC8’s ability to distinguish rear vs. front visibility plays a critical role here. It helps identify sites that offer longer viewing windows and stronger perceptual dominance from the rear seat where decision-makers are most likely seated making it a key differentiator for premium and trust-led categories. Together, these insights prove that auto optimizes for impact, FMCG for recall, and real estate for trust visibility showing how attention metrics adapt to category goals while ensuring measurable outcomes.

On how attention analytics will shape the future of brand storytelling and media planning as OOH becomes more digitised and data-driven.

As outdoor digitizes, attention analytics will inform not just where to advertise but how stories are told in public spaces. This evolution transforms OOH from a static broadcast channel into a dynamic attention ecosystem, where creativity is optimized through evidence-based insight.

On how LOC8’s data-led framework helps marketers quantify OOH impact and make outdoor a more accountable, ROI-driven medium.

LOC8 bridges the gap between intuition and evidence. By quantifying metrics like visibility duration, attention opportunity index, and visual saliency rank, it allows brands to benchmark site performance and justify investment. This data-led approach brings transparency, comparability and ROI measurement to a medium historically driven by perception.

On how OSMO ensures AI and computer vision enhance creativity rather than reduce it to numbers.

OSMO believes that technology should enhance creativity, not overshadow it. LOC8’s attention models reveal what naturally draws the human eye helping creative teams refine design cues, contrast, and visual hierarchy for greater impact. By merging art and science, LOC8 empowers creativity with intelligence.

About the creative best practices and design cues LOC8 has uncovered regarding what truly captures consumer attention outdoors.

LOC8’s visual cognition analysis has surfaced clear patterns across campaigns:

• High contrast and minimal messaging outperform cluttered designs.

• Motion cues draw significantly longer dwell times.

• The first two seconds are critical, creatives must establish focus instantly.

• Contextual alignment between the creative and its environment increases attention by over 30%.

These learnings offer a scientific foundation for creative effectiveness helping brands design OOH that’s visually magnetic and emotionally memorable.

On how attention metrics will integrate into omnichannel planning where OOH, digital and social work together for unified brand impact.

Attention can become the unifying KPI across OOH, digital and social to creates seamless storytelling continuity, where outdoor triggers digital engagement. The future of omnichannel planning lies in attention-led integration ensuring that campaigns don’t just reach audiences everywhere but truly capture and hold their focus.