ContextKeynote address by Sanjay Malhotra, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, at the Global Fintech Festival 2026, Mumbai, 10 September 2026.
Why it mattersIndia's central bank sets out its approach to fintech, light rules while small and firmer as activities grow, and announces tokenised bonds settled in central bank money.
- Innovation can create systemic risks once it reaches scale.
- Consumers need protection as digital finance spreads.
- Many people still lack access to financial services.
- Regulate by activity and risk: same activity, same rules.
- Keep rules light while innovation is small, and step in when it grows.
- Launch tokenised corporate bonds settled with central bank digital currency.
Read the speech summary
1. Potential turned into impact
At the Global Fintech Fest, RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra said that what was once aspiration is now daily reality: roughly 570 million basic bank accounts under the government scheme, hundreds of millions of micro-insurance policies, and about 24 billion UPI payments a month. The real achievement, he said, is that digital finance became ordinary, so even a street flower seller shows a QR code. He credits public-private partnership rather than technology or officials alone. The hardest task remains the last mile: informal-sector savings, micro-insurance, small pensions and small loans for women, farmers and smaller towns, where firms too often chase customers who are already banked. Newer tools, whether AI, quantum computing or tokenisation, are only means to that end.
2. Four ingredients of trust
Trust, he said, is a daily working practice, earned one payment at a time. Recalling hundis, the handwritten merchant notes honoured across great distances on reputation alone, he argued that trust once rested on merchants, now rests on institutions and must extend to intelligent systems. His four ingredients: mitigate AI risks such as opacity and bias; treat customer data as a fiduciary duty, following the consent-based design of the Account Aggregator; accept that responsibility grows with size, so firms become too significant to be careless and must invest in resilience and cyber security; and avoid structuring a business around regulatory gaps or scaling first and seeking forgiveness later, since the sandbox exists for early engagement and rules eventually catch up.
3. A global vision
India's fintech sector ranks third worldwide by funding, with 2.4 billion dollars raised in 2025 and 30 unicorns. After a decade of building for India, he wants the next to build for the world, exporting solutions for inclusion, affordable payments, digital identity and interoperable public infrastructure, and earning leadership by having others adopt its standards.
4. What the RBI is doing
The central bank calls fintech a strategic partner. It runs an on-tap regulatory sandbox, an annual hackathon and a self-regulatory-organisation scheme, recognising United FinTech Forum as the second such body. It is building public infrastructure: the Unified Lending Interface, Account Aggregator, the MuleHunter.ai fraud detector and a proposed Digital Payments Intelligence Platform, plus pilots of programmable CBDC and tokenised certificates of deposit, and it announced tokenised corporate bonds settled in CBDC together with SEBI. Regulation stays activity-based, with the same treatment for the same risk, and light where innovation is young. New AI, model-risk and quantum-resilience work aims to anticipate change.