Issuer study · NBFC
A lender that turned itself into a gold loan company in three years, then sold ₹889 crore of bonds to retail investors. Here is what your money funds, what protects it, what the bonds change hands at today, and why three rating agencies cannot agree on what this company is.
Published 27 July 2026
In August 2022 Capri Global Capital did not make gold loans. By June 2025 gold was its single largest business, run out of 821 branches by more than four thousand staff. Almost everything interesting about these bonds follows from that sentence.
Capri is a non-banking finance company. It lends against property to small businesses, it lends for housing through a subsidiary, it funds builders, and it lends against gold. It has sold bonds to the public twice, in October 2025 and April 2026, raising ₹889 crore between them. Those bonds are what this study is about.
We have read both prospectuses in full, all 1,187 pages of them, along with a year of exchange filings, four rating agency documents, and every trade our own market feed has recorded. Where a claim mattered, we sent a second researcher to try to knock it down. Several got knocked down. Those are noted as they arise.
Twelve separate bonds, from two issues. Each one is a plain promise: Capri pays you interest, then gives you ₹1,000 back on the maturity date. There is no cumulative option, no conversion feature and no redemption premium. The prospectus says it plainly: "Redemption Premium/Discount: Not applicable".
What differs between them is how long you wait and how often you get paid.
| ISIN | Series | Coupon | Paid | Matures | Raised (₹ cr) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| INE180C07189 | I | 8.55% | Monthly | 13 Apr 2027 | 23.37 |
| INE180C07221 | II | 8.90% | Annual | 13 Apr 2027 | 75.92 |
| INE180C07171 | III | 8.90% | Monthly | 13 Oct 2028 | 86.78 |
| INE180C07205 | IV | 9.25% | Annual | 13 Oct 2028 | 41.49 |
| INE180C07197 | V | 9.45% | Annual | 13 Oct 2030 | 112.35 |
| INE180C07213 | VI | 9.70% | Annual | 13 Oct 2035 | 60.09 |
| October 2025 issue | Six series, cap filled exactly, closed a week early | 400.00 | |||
| INE180C07288 | Apr I | 9.00% | Annual | 30 Apr 2028 | 248.13 |
| INE180C07304 | Apr I | 8.80% | Monthly | 30 Apr 2029 | 56.70 |
| INE180C07320 | Apr I | 9.15% | Annual | 30 Apr 2029 | 31.99 |
| INE180C07296 | Apr I | 8.93% | Monthly | 30 Apr 2031 | 22.14 |
| INE180C07338 | Apr I | 9.30% | Annual | 30 Apr 2031 | 36.36 |
| INE180C07312 | Apr I | 9.50% | Annual | 30 Apr 2036 | 93.80 |
| April 2026 issue | Six series, fell ₹10.89 cr short of its ₹500 cr ceiling | 489.11 | |||
There is no differential coupon by investor category. An institution buying ₹50 crore and an individual buying ₹10,000 are offered the identical rate, which is unusual and mildly in retail's favour. There is also no senior citizen bonus and no loyalty rate for existing holders, both of which several competitors do offer.
Thinly, is the short answer. Here is every series, with the last price our feed recorded.
| ISIN | Coupon | Last price | Last traded | Yield | Sessions traded | Can you trust the yield? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| INE180C07288 | 9.00% | 1,015.00 | 27 Jul | 9.37% | 29 of 40 | Yes The most actively traded of the twelve |
| INE180C07312 | 9.50% | 1,055.00 | 27 Jul | 8.97% | 27 of 41 | Yes |
| INE180C07296 | 8.93% | 1,000.00 | 27 Jul | 9.26% | 13 of 41 | Yes Monthly payer, so the yield is an effective annual rate |
| INE180C07320 | 9.15% | 1,020.00 | 24 Jul | 9.17% | 20 of 41 | Yes |
| INE180C07304 | 8.80% | 1,012.90 | 24 Jul | 8.50% | 11 of 41 | Yes |
| INE180C07171 | 8.90% | 1,014.00 | 27 Jul | 8.45% | 22 of 78 | Yes |
| INE180C07205 | 9.25% | 1,050.00 | 23 Jul | 10.34% | 17 of 78 | Mostly Looks high because the price includes accrued interest |
| INE180C07197 | 9.45% | 1,035.99 | 10 Jul | 10.44% | 9 of 78 | Stale Has not traded in eleven sessions; the last print was nine bonds |
| INE180C07213 | 9.70% | 1,028.10 | 22 Jul | 10.50% | 34 of 78 | Noisy That yield rests on a single two bond trade |
| INE180C07338 | 9.30% | 1,090.00 | 23 Jul | 7.52% | 14 of 41 | No One bond changed hands 6.4% above the day's average. The volume weighted yield was about 9.4% |
| INE180C07189 | 8.55% | 988.10 | 24 Jul | 7.44% | 32 of 78 | No Under a year to maturity, so our calculator reports a period return, not an annual yield. Annualised it is about 10.5% |
| INE180C07221 | 8.90% | 1,046.20 | 27 Jul | 8.85% | 34 of 78 | No Same problem. Annualised it is about 12.7% |
Two of these yields are wrong, and they are wrong in our data, not the exchange's. When a bond has less than a year left, our calculator stops annualising and writes a holding period return into a field labelled yield to maturity. So an 8.55% bond trading at a discount appears to yield 7.44%, which is arithmetically impossible for a bond you buy below par.
We found this while researching this page. It is being fixed. We would rather publish the table with two cells marked "do not trust this" than quietly drop the rows.
Now the liquidity, which is the part that matters more than the yield.
Across all twelve series, ₹2.17 crore of these bonds have traded against ₹889 crore issued. That is 0.24% of the paper, roughly ₹2.8 lakh a day spread across twelve lines. On 197 of 262 series days with any trade at all, the whole day's turnover was under ₹1 lakh. Six days consisted of a single ₹1,000 bond changing hands.
Put plainly: a retail sized order will fill. If you want to buy or sell ₹50,000 of these, you will find the other side. If you need to exit ₹20 lakh in a hurry, you will move the price against yourself, and on the thinner series you may not find a buyer that week at all. The 9.45% October 2030 series has traded on nine days out of seventy eight and has not traded at all in the last eleven sessions.
Both issues are listed on BSE only, not NSE. And the online bond platforms mostly do not carry them: at the time of writing SMEST returns no quote, IndiaBonds shows no prices, and Jiraaf lists only Capri's privately placed paper. Practical access is the BSE debt segment through a broker.
Capri started making gold loans in August 2022 from 108 branches. By June 2025 it had 821 gold branches across ten states and 4,928 of its 11,546 employees worked in that business. India Ratings put the growth at a 153% compound annual rate, inside a company growing overall at 50% a year.
| Business | Size (₹ cr) | Share | Yield | Bad loans | Provision cover |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gold loans | 9,105 | 36.8% | 20.7% | 0.81% | 15.7% |
| Housing (subsidiary) | 5,490 | 22.2% | 13.1% | 1.38% | |
| Small business, against property | 5,479 | 22.1% | 15.7% | 4.29% | |
| Construction finance | 4,519 | 18.3% | 17.3% | 0.18% | |
| Indirect lending | 146 | 0.6% |
Read that table twice, because it cuts two ways.
Gold is the best performing book on paper. Bad loans of 0.81% at a 20.7% yield, with the borrower's jewellery in the vault at an average loan to value of about 65%. It is also, by a wide margin, the book with the thinnest provisioning: 15.7% cover, against 41% for the company as a whole. The logic is that gold is liquid and can be auctioned, so you do not need to set aside as much. That logic is defensible. It is also untested, because this book did not exist before August 2022 and every default statistic it has was earned while the gold price was rising.
The weak book is the small business lending at 4.29% bad loans, and it is the most concentrated: Rajasthan alone is 36.67% of it, and the top three states are 84.42%. Across the whole company, the top five states are 78.38% of lending.
Company wide provision coverage fell from 45.19% to 40.97% over a year. The book was simultaneously shifting toward the segment that carries the least cover. Both facts are disclosed. Neither is hidden. Whether the combination is prudent or optimistic is the single biggest judgement call in this credit, and it will be answered by the first serious fall in the gold price.
These are secured bonds. That word does more work in marketing than it does in law, so here is precisely what it means.
There is a trustee, IDBI Trusteeship, which holds the security on behalf of all bondholders and can accelerate the debt on default. Acceleration needs holders of three quarters by value to agree. Default is reckoned at the level of the individual ISIN, so the six series are not automatically cross defaulted with each other by the trustee mechanism.
This is the most interesting thing about Capri, and it is not visible from either prospectus cover.
| Agency | Rating | Outlook | What is covered | Amount | Last action |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acuité | AA+ | Stable | Bank lines and the bonds | ₹13,400 cr | Upgraded 2 Jul 2026 |
| Infomerics | AA | Positive | Bank lines and the bonds | ₹12,595 cr | Reaffirmed 31 Mar 2026 |
| India Ratings | AA- | Stable | Bank loans only, not the bonds | ₹200 cr | Assigned 22 Sep 2025 |
| CRISIL | A1+ | Short term commercial paper only | not disclosed | per Sep 2025 prospectus | |
| Fitch | BB- | International scale | first assigned 2026 | ||
| Moody's | Ba3 | International scale, USD 1bn programme | first assigned 2026 |
It is tempting to say three agencies rate this company three notches apart. That would be sloppy, so we will not. India Ratings rates ₹200 crore of bank loans, about one and a half percent of what Acuité rates, and it does not rate the bonds at all. It assigned that rating once, in September 2025, and has never revisited it. No India Ratings letter appears in either prospectus, and the April 2026 prospectus does not mention the agency's existence.
But the disagreement is real, and it is more interesting than a notch count. The agencies are watching different risks.
| Agency | Stated downgrade trigger | Where Capri is | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acuité | Consolidated bad loans reaching 4.5% | 1.02% at June 2026 | Far |
| India Ratings | "Leverage exceeding 4.0x on a sustained basis" | 3.7x at March 2025, cut to 2.5x by the share sale, back to about 3.3x by March 2026 | Closing |
| Infomerics | No numeric trigger published | n/a | None stated |
The agency with the closer trigger is the one rating lower. That is the whole disagreement in one sentence. Acuité is watching credit quality, which is excellent and getting better. India Ratings is watching the balance sheet, which is levering up quickly. Both are looking at the same company and both are right about what they are looking at.
When Acuité upgraded Capri to AA+ on 2 July 2026, it kept its downgrade trigger at exactly 4.5% bad loans, word for word unchanged from March. An agency that raises a rating while holding its stated red line is expressing more confidence, not relaxing. We checked the upgrade against Capri's own filing to the exchange rather than relying on the agency's website.
One caution on the housing subsidiary. Acuité upgraded Capri Global Housing Finance to AA+ on the same day, which looks like corroboration and is not. Acuité's file on the subsidiary records "Unsupported Rating: Not Applicable" and consolidates it fully into the parent. The subsidiary has no standalone opinion. It is the parent's rating wearing a subsidiary's name.
Capri reported profit up 98% in the year to March 2026, and up 102% in the June 2026 quarter. Numbers like that invite suspicion, so we took the profit apart line by line.
The growth is genuine. Net interest income, which is simply what Capri earns on loans minus what it pays for money, accounts for 107% of the full year increase in pre tax profit and 135% of the quarterly one. Everything else nets out to a drag, mostly the cost of opening branches. There were no exceptional items, no tax writeback, no accounting change, and provisions rose rather than being released.
Two things do need saying alongside it.
Some of the profit is booked before the cash arrives. When Capri sells a slice of a loan to a partner bank, accounting rules let it recognise the present value of its future margin immediately. That was 28.9% of pre tax profit in the year to March 2026. It is real income, but it is front loaded and non cash. Encouragingly it fell to 13.9% in the June quarter, and stripping it out entirely makes the growth look better rather than worse.
The 102% quarterly figure is flattered by a weak comparison. The June 2025 quarter was the worst of that year for credit costs, at 1.5% of average assets against 0.4% to 0.7% in every other quarter. Normalise it and growth is nearer 65%. The cleaner numbers are profit up 25% on the previous quarter, and a cost to income ratio of 44.0%, the lowest the company has recorded.
In June 2025 Capri raised ₹2,000 crore of fresh equity from institutions. That money did two things: it made the company much safer overnight, and it gave it room to borrow far more. It has been using that room fast.
Capital adequacy fell 984 basis points in four quarters while borrowings grew. Both series are standalone, on the company's own Regulation 52(4) disclosures. The regulatory floor is 15%, so there is still substantial room, but the direction is unambiguous.
Standalone borrowings rose ₹2,944 crore in the June quarter alone, a 15.6% increase in ninety days, while net worth grew 4.65% from retained earnings and nothing else. That gap is the whole of the move.
The clearest evidence of the pace is not a ratio at all. On 30 April 2026 the board raised the company's borrowing ceiling from ₹25,000 crore to ₹35,000 crore. At 30 June borrowings stood at ₹21,847 crore. Under the old ceiling that left ₹3,153 crore of room, roughly one quarter at the current rate. The limit was raised because it was about to bind.
None of this is alarming on its own. Capital adequacy of 24.66% against a 15% floor is comfortable, and the company can grow substantially before that binds. Cost of borrowing has stopped falling, though, sitting around 9.15% after improving through the prior year, and the AA+ upgrade landed two days after the quarter closed so none of its benefit shows yet.
In the year to March 2025, Capri's auditor filed a report with the Central Government under Section 143(12) of the Companies Act, in the prescribed Form ADT-4. That is the formal route by which an auditor escalates a suspected fraud of ₹1 crore or more directly to the government. It is not a routine filing. Capri's auditors made no such filing in the two preceding years.
The frauds were committed against Capri, not by it. The company disclosed that it "has initiated criminal proceedings against certain former employees under the gold loan business for committing fraud in connivance with borrowers". Every remedial measure the company lists is a gold loan branch control: surprise audits on holidays, cross zone audits, branch staff rotation, automating the movement of vault keys, and refresher training for staff on checking gold.
| Year to March | Parent, reported to RBI | Group total |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 11.18 | |
| 2024 | 22.08 | |
| 2025 | 82.36 | 110.26 |
Three things keep this in proportion. The audit opinion for that year was unmodified, on both the parent and the group accounts. The amounts are small against a company earning ₹949 crore. And a lender that catches its own staff, prosecutes them and reports it is doing what it should.
What sits awkwardly is that the litigation chapter of the same prospectus states there are "no material frauds that have been committed against our Company in the last three years". The word material is never defined in the document, so the statement cannot be tested. Both facts are in the prospectus. We are simply putting them next to each other, which the prospectus does not.
Capri Global Capital was previously called Money Matters Financial Services. Under that name it was the intermediary at the centre of the 2010 LIC Housing Finance bribes for loans case, in which the CBI arrested senior officials at several public sector lenders. Capri's promoter and managing director, Rajesh Sharma, was arrested in November 2010 and granted bail. The employee share plan is still legally named the Money Matters Employee Stock Option Plan 2009.
We could find no publicly traceable outcome: no chargesheet, trial, conviction, acquittal or discharge reported anywhere. Capri's March 2026 offer document, which is required to disclose outstanding criminal proceedings against promoters with no time limit, lists only borrower disputes and does not disclose any proceeding arising from that case. It also states there is no securities law violation, no wilful defaulter tag and no regulatory debarment against the promoters.
So the accurate position, and the only one we will state, is this: arrested in 2010, granted bail, no traceable outcome in the public record, and not disclosed as an outstanding proceeding in the company's own 2026 filing. That is neither a conviction nor a confirmed closure, and anyone telling you it is either has gone further than the documents allow.
Two present day facts belong beside it. The promoter family holds 59.95% of Capri with no shares pledged, which we verified three ways including the annual declarations every promoter party filed in April 2026. And the family holding company is chaired by Rama Subramaniam Gandhi, a former Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India.
A finding that surprised us: almost none of the big NBFC names sell bonds to retail at all. Muthoot Finance, Shriram, Bajaj, Tata Capital, L&T Finance and Piramal all fund themselves privately from institutions. The retail public bond market is a smaller and generally weaker rated group, which means Capri sits near the top of it.
| Issuer | When | Rating | Coupons | Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Power Finance Corporation | Jan 2026 | AAA | 6.85% to 7.05% | ₹5,000 cr |
| Surat Municipal Corporation | Oct 2025 | AA+ | 8.00% flat | ₹200 cr |
| IIFL Finance | Feb 2026 | AA | 8.37% to 9.00% | ₹2,000 cr |
| Capri Global, second issue | Apr 2026 | AA | 8.80% to 9.50% | ₹489 cr |
| Capri Global, first issue | Oct 2025 | AA | 8.55% to 9.70% | ₹400 cr |
| Muthoot Fincorp | Jun 2026 | AA | 8.51% to 9.25% | ₹600 cr |
| Sammaan Capital | Jul 2025 | AA | 8.65% to 9.95% | ₹200 cr |
| Adani Enterprises | Jan 2026 | AA- | 8.48% to 8.90% | ₹1,000 cr |
| Edelweiss Financial Services | Jun 2026 | A+ | 8.65% to 10.00% | ₹300 cr |
| Nido Home Finance | Aug 2025 | A+ | 9.00% to 10.50% | ₹200 cr |
| Kosamattam Finance | May 2026 | A | 8.50% to 10.00% | ₹300 cr |
Worth noticing: Capri's second issue paid less than its first, 8.80% to 9.50% against 8.55% to 9.70% at the long end, six months later. Better perceived credit, or a softer rate environment, or both. And it still did not fill.
Capri's April 2026 issue had a base size of ₹100 crore with permission to keep up to ₹500 crore. Demand of roughly ₹489 crore is 4.9 times the base, and 0.98 times the ceiling. Both numbers are true. The first is the one that gets into headlines and it tells you almost nothing. Always ask what the denominator is.
We are not licensed to tell you whether to buy this, and we will not. What follows is the case each way, drawn from the documents.