(MENAFN- Live Mint) Mumbai: Fintechs in India have a clear mandate from the head of the country's central bank: design products that are accessible, inclusive, and tailored for underserved populations.

Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest 2025 in Mumbai on Wednesday, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Sanjay Malhotra urged fintechs to ensure that no segment is left behind even as serving affluent customers remains lucrative.

“Design products and services that are easy to use, accessible for all, with assistive technologies, ensuring that vulnerable groups such as senior citizens, individuals with limited digital literacy and the specially abled are not left behind,” Malhotra said.

He called on fintechs to bridge digital divides, foster competition, and innovate while thinking global but anchoring local.“Engage with international partners, share learnings, adopt global best practices and strengthen India's role in shaping the future of digital finance,” he said.

Next phase of digital transformation

Malhotra framed this as part of India's next phase of digital financial growth-moving beyond building access to universalizing services and deepening impact by using data responsibly.

“Some work has been done by us in these areas, more needs to be done,” he said. This includes aggregation and leveraging of financial data through the development of the digital rupee, asset tokenization, artificial intelligence and the account aggregator framework.

“RBI is in the process of introducing standards designed to improve customer onboarding processes, enhance user interfaces, strengthen data security, and increase transparency and awareness in consent management and data sharing under the account aggregator framework,” he said.

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He added that the success of this will, however, depend on interoperability between financial platforms and expansion in delivery of credit through the Unified Lending Interface (ULI) platform.

Digital public infrastructure at scale

“The foundation of digital public infrastructure (DPI) has allowed these fintechs to set up quickly and to scale rapidly and deliver targeted solutions to not only address current but also future challenges,” Malhotra said.

He added that India is home to over 10,000 fintechs aided by the large and deep pool of skilled talent, a vibrant financial ecosystem, and enabling government policies and regulatory frameworks.

The governor highlighted how India's digital public infrastructure - from Aadhaar-based identity and unified payments interface (UPI) payments to digitized government data-allows fintechs to scale rapidly and deliver targeted solutions.

He added that the central bank has chosen to keep fintechs out of the purview of the regulatory space so far given the diversity of companies in the sector. However, it has recognized a self-regulatory organisation to enable the fintechs to adopt baseline governance standards and best practices.

Tokenisation, AI

On Wednesday, the RBI chief announced the introduction of asset tokenisation, which he said will open up new possibilities for Indian financial markets by expanding access, improving transparency and enhancing settlement efficiency through smart contracts.

“The Reserve Bank has conceptualized a unified markets interface (UMI) as a new next-generation financial market infrastructure. This interface will have the capability to tokenize financial assets and settlements using wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC),” Malhotra said, adding that early efforts and results from the inaugural pilot“are encouraging”.

The RBI has currently rolled out tokenisation of short-term securities, including certificates of deposit, for bank-to-bank transactions.

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Another area of development, Malhotra highlighted, is the integration of AI into existing layers of DPI to improve user experience and efficiency through solutions such as conversational payments.

“That AI itself can be deployed as a public good has also highlighted the importance of building data infrastructure, computing resources and the development of indigenous AI models tailored to the needs of the financial system,” he said.

Netbanking 2.0

In other announcements on Wednesday, the RBI governor unveiled an interoperable netbanking platform called 'Banking Connect' to enable seamless payments and standardized merchant onboarding across banks and bank accounts, including QR code-based mobile netbanking transactions.

Banks can join a centralised platform set up by NPCI's subsidiary NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd (NBBL) and directly enable netbanking transactions by leveraging the IMPS (immediate payment service) technology. The initiative initially termed 'Netbanking 2.0', was being piloted with 10 banks.

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Mint had in January 2025 reported that the central bank, with NBBL, is looking to make netbanking interoperable with mobile payments.

Malhotra also introduced the AI-based 'UPI HELP' powered by NPCI's small language model (SLM) for providing assistance for payments, mandates, and dispute resolution; IoT Payments with UPI for enabling transactions directly from connected devices such as cars, smart TVs, and wearables; and 'UPI Reserve Pay' to allow users to securely block and manage credit limits for specific purposes across merchant and UPI apps.

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