The 2% Problem in Iran’s Lending Market

Iran has 90 million people, near-universal banking cards, and one of the world’s most cash-shy retail cultures. Almost everyone transacts digitally. Almost nobody borrows digitally. Industry data for the fiscal year ending March 2025 puts the country’s consumer lending market at around 1,827 trillion toman, and the fintech share of it at roughly 2%. That single ratio is the clearest growth story in Iranian fintech, and this page is its running record.

How a market this size stays analog

The market is not small and it is not offline by preference. Consumer credit in Iran runs through bank branches, employer co-signing, post-dated checks, and informal family lending. The reported market size is 1,827 trillion toman for FY2024-25. Around twenty fintech players compete for the digital slice, split between online microloans and buy-now-pay-later. Most are under three years old. None has meaningful scale against the banks yet.

What the early winners look like

The BNPL segment alone reached about 75,000 billion toman in FY2024-25, a third of all online credit, with 5 to 6 million active users against 40 million potential. Inside that segment the leaders are already legible. AzkiVam issued 73,000 loans worth about 3,500 billion toman in 2024 and passed 3 million users. Keepa served 3 million users and processed 20 million transactions in the same fiscal year, by its own count. These are real books, small only against the size of the prize.

Why penetration stays low

Three brakes. Credit scoring is thin, so lenders price risk blind or demand collateral the way banks do. Funding is expensive, with the interbank rate at 24%, which squeezes any margin a digital lender hopes to earn. And the regulator is still deciding what this industry is allowed to be, with oversight systems expanding to cover fintech lenders this summer.

What to watch

Three signals will tell you the 2% is moving. First, the pivot to business lending: several players are shifting from consumer microloans to SME credit, where checks clear larger and defaults behave better. Second, bank partnerships like Khanoumi’s supply-chain finance line with Saman Bank, the model that lets fintechs originate while banks fund. Third, loan tenors stretching longer, which is what a lending market does when it starts trusting its own data.

Two percent of that market is the starting line, not the ceiling. We track every move on the signals feed, and the companies behind them in the registry.