Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai showcased India’s rapid shift beyond basic transactions, with new AI platforms, tokenisation initiatives, and international collaborations redefining the future of digital payments and financial infrastructure.
Global Fintech Fest 2026 opened in Mumbai with a clear message: India’s payments industry is moving beyond basic transfers and into a broader set of tools built around AI, tokenisation and new forms of credit. At the inauguration, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged the sector to turn those technologies into practical systems, while organisers said the event would focus on trusted, connected and global financial infrastructure.
The National Payments Corporation of India used the platform to unveil a series of products aimed at widening access and reducing friction in banking and payments. Among them were open-source Android ATMs for rural and corporate settings, a new enterprise AI platform called AiNxt, and AtOM, a system for partner onboarding across UPI. NPCI also proposed an agentic framework for autonomous micro-payments, underscoring how quickly the conversation is shifting from digitisation to machine-driven transactions. The payments body also introduced Token Nxt within the Bharat AI Zone to showcase AI-linked financial applications.
Other announcements pointed to the same direction. UIDAI launched a Face Auth SDK and Sandbox to make Aadhaar face authentication easier for developers to test and integrate. Separately, the Centre expanded credit-on-UPI to cover government schemes, bringing more than 7.7 crore Kisan Credit Card accounts and 57 crore PM Mudra loans onto digital rails, according to event disclosures. Maharashtra, meanwhile, is developing a framework to tokenise land and other immovable assets, which could eventually make property-backed liquidity easier to access.
One of the most visible commercial tie-ups came from PhonePe and Visa, who announced three cardless payment capabilities: Tap to Pay, Cross Border Scan to Pay and Smart Accept. Reuters-style reporting from LiveMint and The Economic Times said the partnership would let PhonePe support cross-border and merchant payments in India and 14 other countries, and that the app would be the first in India to offer Visa’s cross-border QR capability. Other launches at the festival included Jio Payments Solutions with Citi on cross-border payments, BharatPe and Pine Labs on agentic AI tools, and Yubi on a new retail lending platform, showing that fintech competition is now spreading well beyond UPI alone.
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