GFF 2026: From Digital Payments To Intelligent Finance
At Global Fintech Fest 2026, conversations across AI, tokenisation, cybersecurity, digital public infrastructure, inclusion and global finance revealed a financial system being rebuilt beneath everyday economic life, writes Manu Shrivastava
There are conferences where the future is discussed as though it were still waiting somewhere ahead, and then there are those where the future appears to have quietly entered the room before anyone has finished naming it. Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai belonged to the latter category, bringing together policymakers, regulators, bankers, fintech founders, technology companies, investors and researchers around a financial system becoming less about individual products and increasingly about the infrastructure connecting them. Held from September 8 to 11 at Jio World Centre and the Trident, the festival placed Agentic AI, tokenisation and quantum technologies alongside the less glamorous but more consequential questions of cybersecurity, data, trust, regulation and inclusion.
The most interesting aspect of GFF 2026, therefore, was not any single keynote but the consistency of questions emerging from rooms dealing with very different subjects. Whether the discussion concerned UPI, artificial intelligence, digital lending, wealth management, cross-border payments or fraud, the underlying issue was increasingly the same. How does finance function when the boundaries separating institutions, technologies and transactions begin to disappear? India’s first fintech revolution was about putting finance online; the next appears increasingly concerned with making finance operate invisibly within everything else.
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| PM Narendra Modi interacting with exhibitors at GFF 2026 in Mumbai |
The scale of the festival reflected that transition, with a programme spanning plenaries, specialised sessions, closed-door roundtables, networking conversations and technology-led discussions, and bringing together senior representatives from the RBI, SEBI, PFRDA, IFSCA, government, banking, technology and investment sectors. It was not merely a gathering of fintech companies predicting what customers might want next, but a meeting point between those designing the rules, those building the systems and those trying to understand what those systems will mean for the economy.
The opening conversation inevitably returned to UPI, whose scale has become almost too familiar to surprise. Still, GFF repeatedly moved beyond the transaction itself towards what can be built around a payment once the payment layer becomes ubiquitous. With UPI processing 24.51 billion transactions in August 2026, the more difficult question is no longer whether Indians will use digital payments but what additional financial relationships can emerge from the infrastructure and economic activity surrounding those payments.
That question was particularly visible in discussions around financial inclusion. The small merchant, farmer, informal worker and micro entrepreneur appeared not merely as beneficiaries of digital finance but as participants whose economic activity generates information that could support credit, insurance, savings and other services. The challenge, however, is not simply to collect more data but to ensure that it can be used legitimately, safely and productively without turning inclusion into another form of surveillance.
If one theme occupied almost every corner of GFF 2026, it was artificial intelligence. But the conversation had moved beyond whether AI would transform financial services to the harder question of what happens when AI begins to act rather than merely assist. Discussions around AI-native financial institutions, autonomous banking, AI foundations for BFSI, agentic customer engagement and outcome-driven enterprises suggested that the industry is moving from experimentation towards integrating AI into the core of financial operations.
The distinction is important because an AI pilot can be impressive without being particularly useful, whereas an AI system embedded within underwriting, servicing, fraud detection or risk management becomes part of the institution itself. Questions therefore arose over whether financial institutions should merely access AI models or develop and control their own capabilities, and whether BFSI organisations are prepared for AI to become an operating layer rather than another software application.
The appetite for autonomy was accompanied by an equally strong anxiety about control. Cybersecurity discussions considered AI-powered fraud, deepfakes, synthetic identities, automated social engineering and vulnerabilities spreading through increasingly connected systems, even as another conversation examined whether AI itself could help address the widening shortage of cybersecurity expertise. The irony was unmistakable. The technology making finance faster and more intelligent is simultaneously making financial threats faster and more sophisticated.
Trust consequently ceased to be merely an ethical consideration and became an infrastructure requirement. RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra’s warning that customer data should be treated as a fiduciary responsibility rather than simply a business asset acquired greater significance in a system increasingly dependent on data exchange. Purpose-based collection, consent, cybersecurity and responsible growth cannot remain peripheral concerns when information itself becomes part of the financial architecture.
The idea of frictionless trust captured the contradiction neatly. Digital identity, Aadhaar, CKYC and increasingly sophisticated verification systems can make onboarding and authentication easier, but every reduction in friction demands stronger protection against fraud and misuse. The future of finance may therefore depend upon achieving something that sounds contradictory, which is making legitimate transactions almost effortless while making illegitimate access considerably harder.
Tokenisation opened another door, leading beyond the conventional understanding of what constitutes a financial asset. Nandan Nilekani’s Finternet proposition suggested that tokenisation could extend beyond securities into real-world assets such as livestock, agricultural produce, loans and invoices. A token representing a cow with information about its ownership and health, or a warehouse receipt carrying details of stored produce, points towards a financial system in which physical economic assets can acquire digital identities capable of interacting with financial infrastructure.
The importance of such a model lies less in creating another digital token than in making economic assets more legible to financial systems. A farmer holding produce, a small enterprise carrying invoices or a business possessing receivables may possess considerable economic value without having the documentation or institutional visibility traditionally required to unlock finance. Tokenisation could narrow that gap if supported by trusted data and interoperable infrastructure, although ownership, valuation, authentication, fraud and legal enforceability remain fundamental questions.
This is where the Unified Lending Interface assumes a larger significance. ULI represents the movement of India’s digital public infrastructure from payments towards credit, connecting lenders with information and services needed to make lending journeys faster and more integrated. Its importance lies less in creating another financial product than in reducing the institutional distance between economic activity and the financial service that activity may require.
The same principle appeared in discussions about whether India’s digital public infrastructure can become a global blueprint. The question is no longer simply whether India can digitise its own financial system but whether the architecture developed here can become part of the vocabulary of financial infrastructure elsewhere. Discussions around the India–UK fintech corridor similarly examined market access, cross-border payments, embedded finance, digital identity, AI and investment opportunities, suggesting that India’s fintech story is increasingly being viewed as a potential export story involving systems, standards and infrastructure.
There was little suggestion that technology alone would determine this future. The presence of regulators and financial institutions throughout GFF served as a reminder that finance differs from many technology sectors because mistakes can destroy savings, disrupt businesses and undermine systemic confidence. The more connected and automated financial infrastructure becomes, the more important accountability, resilience, data sovereignty and regulatory responsibility become.
This concern surfaced in discussions around the “always-on” financial core, where resilience, data residency, sovereignty and multi-cloud architecture were treated as strategic rather than merely technical questions. A sophisticated application is of little consequence if the infrastructure beneath it cannot withstand disruption or meet requirements of security and availability. The financial institution of the future may consequently be judged as much by the strength of its invisible architecture as by the elegance of its visible interface.
Wealth management appeared to be undergoing a similar transformation. Discussions around composable wealth platforms considered API-first and microservices-based systems, embedded AI and personalised advisory, suggesting that even relationship-driven financial services are becoming increasingly platform-based. The adviser may remain, but the tools surrounding that adviser are becoming more intelligent, interconnected and dependent upon data.
And somewhere amid the algorithms, tokenised assets and digital rails was the older and more human question of who gets included. Discussions repeatedly returned to MSMEs, farmers, informal workers, women entrepreneurs and customers outside major urban centres because a financial system can become extraordinarily efficient without becoming equally accessible. Inclusion cannot therefore be measured only by accounts opened or transactions completed; it must also be measured by whether people can obtain appropriate credit, insurance, savings and protection when they actually need them.
The presence of initiatives such as the Global Fintech Women’s Breakfast broadened that conversation into participation and leadership. Such gatherings can appear peripheral beside discussions about AI and quantum technologies, yet they point to an important truth about innovation - systems can be technologically advanced while the institutions creating them remain socially narrow. A financial future intended to serve everyone cannot be designed permanently by the same limited circle of participants.
GFF’s networking events and leadership gatherings provided another revealing dimension. The festival did not end when formal sessions ended, with dinners, meetings and informal conversations extending discussions around AI, global financial flows, innovation and customer experience beyond the conference floor. The distinction between conference and ecosystem was therefore blurred not merely in theory but in practice.
Perhaps the most striking feature of GFF 2026 was that its conversations did not finally converge on a single technology. They converged on a change in the location of finance itself. Money is moving through real-time rails, information through consent-based networks, credit is becoming connected to economic data, artificial intelligence is entering decision-making, assets are becoming candidates for tokenisation and security systems are increasingly dependent upon intelligent detection.
The consequence is a financial system that may become simultaneously more powerful and less visible. The customer may see a payment, a purchase, a loan approval or an insurance product, but beneath that apparently simple interaction could sit identity infrastructure, data exchange, AI models, risk engines, fraud intelligence, regulatory controls and interoperable payment rails. What appears to be one transaction may increasingly be the visible end of an ecosystem doing much more work underneath.
This is why the most important question emerging from GFF 2026 may not be what fintech will build next, but what finance will become when the boundaries between financial services and ordinary economic activity finally begin to dissolve. UPI showed that a payment can become infrastructure; the emerging generation of AI, tokenisation, digital lending and interoperable data systems suggests that the same logic can extend much further.
The future discussed in Mumbai was consequently not one in which technology replaces finance, banks disappear or algorithms simply take over human decisions. It was a future in which finance becomes increasingly embedded, programmable, intelligent and connected, while trust, inclusion and accountability become the conditions for allowing that architecture to grow.
And perhaps that is the most curious paradox of all. The more successful the next generation of fintech becomes, the less the customer may notice the technology behind it, because the ultimate achievement of financial innovation may not be to make finance more visible but to make access to finance so seamless that it simply becomes part of everyday economic life.
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