Global Fintech Fest 2026: India Moves from Digital Payments to Digital Finance

Sep 19

9 min read

The seventh edition of the Global Fintech Fest (GFF), held at the Jio World Centre in Mumbai from 8 to 11 September 2026, brought together regulators, bankers, start-up founders and investors under the theme "Potential to Impact: Agentic AI, Tokenisation, Quantum". Organised by the Payments Council of India, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and the Fintech Convergence Council, the event was expected to draw more than one lakh delegates, over 8,000 institutions, 1,200 speakers and 500 investors. Since its first edition in 2020, the festival has grown from an industry conference into the principal platform on which India unveils changes to its financial infrastructure, and this year's announcements extended across digital payments, bond markets, identity verification and highway tolling.

The Agenda Set at the Inauguration

The festival opened on 8 September with Prime Minister Narendra Modi placing the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) at the centre of India's fintech story. UPI processed more than 24 billion transactions in August 2026 and is now live in 11 countries, and the next objective set for the industry is to widen that reach abroad, lower the cost of remittances sent home by Indians overseas, and develop Indian standards capable of connecting with the global financial system.

The broader direction was a move beyond payments into credit, insurance, savings, investments and pensions, particularly for small businesses and workers that traditional lenders continue to underserve. This came with a four-point agenda for the sector: world-class cybersecurity, ethical data protection standards, a stronger regulator-industry innovation ecosystem, and a Fintech Consumer Protection Index under which every company could be rated transparently. Who would administer the index, what it would measure and what consequences would follow a poor rating were left open.

Faster UPI, with more control for users

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) used the festival to highlight both the gains delivered by fintech and the importance of trust in sustaining them. Account-opening and settlement times have fallen, transaction costs have come down and fraud detection has improved, with the clearest effect visible in lending to small firms through cash-flow-based credit, account aggregators and the Unified Lending Interface (ULI). India's fintech ecosystem now ranks third in the world and includes 30 unicorns, yet RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra cautioned that a fast financial system which does not command trust will find few users.

In line with this, the RBI recognised the Unified Fintech Forum (UFF), formerly the Digital Lenders Association of India, as the second self-regulatory organisation for the fintech sector, two years after the first such body, FACE, was recognised at the same forum. The UFF has 118 members, including NBFCs, loan service providers and credit bureaus, and is expected to set baseline conduct standards for its members while acting as a channel between the industry and the regulator.

Two NPCI products launched on 10 September reflect this balance between speed and safety. UPI Tap & Pay allows a user to unlock an NFC-enabled phone and tap it on a merchant's terminal, drawing on the terminal's internet connection, with no PIN required for payments of up to ₹5,000 and support for RuPay credit cards on UPI. MyUPI, built on NPCI's own small language model, FiMI, provides a single view of all UPI payments and AutoPay mandates across banks and apps, allows users to delink their mobile number from receiving payments, and offers round-the-clock support in several languages. Biometric UPI authentication, introduced at the previous edition, had already crossed 6.29 billion transactions by 31 August 2026.

NPCI also signalled that artificial intelligence will increasingly sit beneath the payments system itself. It released AiNxt, an open-source, enterprise-grade platform for building, testing and deploying custom AI agents, and AtOM, an AI-driven orchestration platform that manages integration, change management and partner onboarding across UPI while producing digitally signed records that create an audit trail for compliance. A Unified Agent Protocol, under which AI agents could make small-ticket payments without the user approving every single transaction, was also expected to be unveiled, marking the first step towards agent-led payments on UPI.

Credit and Inclusion: ATMs, Credit Lines and Cash Deposits

Several announcements were aimed squarely at rural and underserved customers. The Department of Financial Services (DFS) introduced open-source Android ATMs that function as small digital banking units in transit hubs, villages, corporate parks and campuses, handling account openings, loan applications and cheque deposits. These machines can also issue RuPay cards and merchant UPI QR codes on the spot, cutting onboarding time from weeks to minutes, and nine lenders, including State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda and Slice Small Finance Bank, are trialling them with manufacturers Hitachi Payment Services, Perto India and Vortex Engineering.

The Ministry of Finance also extended the Credit Line on UPI facility to the Kisan Credit Card (KCC) and PM MUDRA Yojana, allowing beneficiaries to link their pre-sanctioned credit directly to UPI and pay merchants digitally. The potential base is large, covering over 7.7 crore active KCC accounts with sanctioned limits above ₹10 lakh crore and more than 57 crore MUDRA loans worth over ₹40 lakh crore, although only ten banks have so far enabled the facility for KCC holders and eight for MUDRA borrowers. A new Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AePS) service now lets depositors put cash directly into another person's bank account through a local banking agent, with biometric verification and a name check by SMS before the transfer to prevent money going to the wrong account, and fourteen institutions have already enabled it.

Tokenisation Enters the Bond Market

The most technical announcement of the week was "Demat 2.0", India's first pilot for tokenised corporate bonds, launched jointly by the RBI and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on 10 September. Bonds under the pilot are issued directly on a shared ledger, ownership continues to be recorded by the statutory depositories, and the cash leg of each transaction is settled in the central bank's digital rupee. REC and Larsen & Toubro have each raised ₹500 crore and IIFL ₹25 crore, bringing the total to ₹1,025 crore, and investors hold these bonds in their existing demat accounts without a fresh KYC process.

The framework may later extend to equities, mutual fund units and electronic gold receipts. The pilot also clarifies India's wider position on digital assets: the central bank remains cautious about private cryptocurrencies but is prepared to adopt ledger technology wherever settlement takes place in central bank money.

Public Infrastructure: Face Checks and FASTag Portability

Public digital infrastructure also featured prominently. On 9 September, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) released an Aadhaar Face Authentication SDK and Sandbox, enabling banks, fintechs and government departments to build face verification directly into their Android and iOS applications instead of relying on a separate background app. The sandbox allows developers to test consent, face capture and liveness checks before deployment without any specialised hardware. Aadhaar face authentication, introduced in 2021, has already processed more than 500 crore transactions across nearly 200 organisations.

The closing day saw the launch of OneTag, a FASTag portability service developed by the Indian Highways Management Company (IHMCL) and NPCI and unveiled by Union Minister Nitin Gadkari. Vehicle owners can now switch their issuing bank while keeping the same tag and tag ID, which removes the need to replace the windshield sticker, and the service is available through NHAI's Rajmargyatra app.

Industry Launches: Cardless Payments and AI agents

Announcements from the private sector pointed to two clear trends: payments without a physical card, and AI agents capable of acting on behalf of consumers and merchants. PhonePe and Visa introduced three services on 9 September: Tap to Pay, which allows Android users to pay at shop terminals with a saved Visa card; Cross Border Scan to Pay, which enables QR payments in 14 overseas markets including Singapore, Thailand and Japan; and Smart Accept, which turns a small merchant's phone into a card-acceptance device. Visa also staged live demonstrations of agentic commerce with banks and payment firms such as Razorpay, Pine Labs and Juspay, in which an AI assistant carries a customer from product discovery through to payment, alongside a whitepaper on cyber resilience in an era of advanced AI.

Agentic AI ran through many of the other launches. BharatPe introduced an agentic AI platform for merchants and businesses, Pine Labs partnered with L&T Finance to add an agentic commerce feature to the PLANET app that lets AI agents complete transactions on a user's behalf within preset limits, and Bengaluru-based Gnani AI extended its sovereign agentic AI platform, Artha, to banks, insurers and other financial institutions. Sarvam and Mahindra Finance scaled up their partnership on voice AI, while on the final day PayU introduced Agent HQ, a no-code platform through which its 4.5 lakh merchants can deploy AI agents for sales, marketing, refunds and reconciliation and make their catalogues discoverable on AI search tools.

Lending and cross-border payments also drew new entrants. Yubi launched Pye, a lending platform for retail borrowers; Jio Payments Solutions and Citi announced a cross-border payments service; CCAvenue expanded its partnership with DCB Bank to offer digital fee collection to educational institutions; and BharatPeX, the enterprise arm of BharatPe, added a payment gateway that supports more than 100 payment options and routes each transaction to the bank partner most likely to process it successfully.

Ideas : Trust, AI and the Pace of Regulation

Beyond the launches, the festival's main sessions returned repeatedly to one question: how to let innovation grow quickly without creating new weaknesses in the financial system. The SEBI Chairman framed this as a false choice, arguing that growing fast and growing safe are not competing goals, because markets grow sustainably only when innovation earns trust and trust is backed by resilience. He also warned that the move to quantum-safe systems cannot wait until the threat of quantum computers breaking today's encryption becomes real, and called for "crypto-agility" and a phased shift to post-quantum cryptography, which SEBI has already written into its cyber resilience framework. The IOSCO Fintech Task Force, which brings together securities regulators from around the world, held its plenary in Mumbai on the sidelines of the festival, giving these debates an international audience.

The RBI Governor added that customer data should be treated as a fiduciary responsibility rather than a commercial asset, and urged fintech firms to look beyond urban users towards small businesses and consumers in smaller towns. Closing the festival on 11 September, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman described artificial intelligence as a double-edged sword that can detect fraud faster but can also help fraudsters automate larger and more sophisticated schemes. She argued that the success of Indian fintech should be judged not only by transactions and valuations but by the trust it earns and the problems it solves, said she had discussed with the RBI a "soft-touch" approach to regulation that does not choke innovation, and urged the central bank to push ahead with its wholesale and retail digital rupee pilots. She also dismissed pessimism about India's demographic dividend, pointing to the thousands of young founders and engineers at the event as evidence that it is already being realised.

The Backdrop: Fraud and The Credit Gap

The repeated emphasis on trust and credit throughout the festival reflects two persistent challenges. Ministry of Home Affairs data placed before the Lok Sabha in July 2026 shows that more than 65 lakh financial fraud complaints were filed on the national cybercrime portal between 2021 and 2025, involving reported losses of over ₹55,050 crore, of which only about ₹8,189 crore, roughly one rupee in every seven, was frozen in time. The case for stronger user controls and a credible consumer protection framework rests largely on these figures.

The credit gap is equally significant. According to a NITI Aayog report, formal lenders met only 19 per cent of the credit needs of small businesses by FY21, leaving an estimated ₹80 lakh crore gap that is filled largely through costly informal borrowing. Converting the data trail generated by digital payments into fairly priced loans for these businesses remains the central opportunity for the next phase of Indian fintech.

What to Watch Next

The impact of GFF 2026 will depend on how far its announcements reach ordinary users, and several developments merit close attention in the months ahead. The first is whether the proposed Fintech Consumer Protection Index acquires a clear owner, published measures and real consequences, and how it will work alongside the two self-regulatory bodies now recognised by the RBI. The second is the pace at which UPI Tap & Pay, MyUPI and the Credit Line on UPI for KCC and MUDRA borrowers actually reach the public, since all of them depend on banks, apps and merchants upgrading their systems. The third is how regulators handle agent-led payments, as AI agents begin to transact on behalf of users with less direct approval at each step. The fourth is whether Demat 2.0 expands beyond its first three issuers, and whether the digital rupee pilots move forward as the Finance Minister urged.

Taken together, the festival marked a shift from making payments fast to building credit, identity, investment and AI services on the same digital rails, and the next edition will offer a measure of how much of that ambition has reached the small traders, farmers and manufacturers it is meant to serve.

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