Published on: April 8, 2026
Think Design, Havas India’s specialist UI/UX and experience design agency, has partnered with Grihum Housing Finance Limited, one of India’s leading affordable housing finance companies, to design and deliver Ekhum, a unified digital platform powering Grihum’s entire lending lifecycle, from loan origination and credit appraisal to collections, HR operations, and customer self-service.
For a sector long defined by legacy systems and fragmented processes, Ekhum signals a different way of building, one where the quality of the experience was never an afterthought, but the starting point.
Varun Guliani, Chief Information Officer, Grihum Housing Finance, said: “The success of Ekhum would not have been possible without Think Design. They don’t start with screens; they start with understanding the business. Before a single interface was designed, they had deeply understood our domain, our verticals, and the real working conditions of our users. That foundation meant development was largely first-time right, a rare achievement in large-scale digital transformation.”
The result was a platform that reduced fresh loan login time to 40 minutes, where the typical industry turnaround time extends to a day or more. It delivers a fully paperless customer onboarding experience through Aadhaar-based authentication, and automated bank statement analysis through account aggregator integration. What began as a loan origination platform has since expanded to cover partner onboarding, HR and people management, an employee portal, and a self-service customer portal, making Ekhum a true enterprise-wide transformation.
Read more: Think Design Reinvents the Website Experience for hero MotoCorp’s EV Brand Vida World
Deepali Saini, CEO, Think Design & Global Chief Experience Design Officer at Havas CX, said:
“With Ekhum, we were designing at the intersection of financial inclusion and enterprise transformation. Through first principles thinking, we delivered outcomes that redefine what a modern housing finance enterprise can be and raise the bar for what the industry should expect from a design-integrated digital transformation.”
Prakhar Srivastava, Project Lead, Think Design, said:
“This was one of the most layered design engagements we have worked on, not just in scope, but in the depth of domain understanding required. Translating genuinely complex financial workflows into experiences that feel assistive and intuitive demanded a very different kind of design thinking.”
Grihum serves families across India, including many who have historically had limited access to formal financial institutions. With 209 branches across 18 states and multiple users spanning field relationship managers, credit analysts, branch operations teams, and first-time home loan customers, the scale and diversity of the challenge was considerable.
Grihum’s product leadership recognised that meeting this challenge required more than incremental digitisation, it demanded an industry-first platform built around the needs of every user it would serve, from the field to the head office.
Think Design was brought in to translate that vision into reality. The team immersed itself in the domain, mapping the full lending lifecycle, conducting field research across organisational tiers, and building an information architecture that could serve every function without losing contextual relevance for any one of them.
A mobile-first approach was adopted for field-facing roles while web experiences were optimised for credit and operations teams, and ensuring that Grihum’s ambition for a seamless, enterprise-wide experience was matched by equally considered design execution.
