The AI, UPI and digital asset reckoning – GFF 2025

The 6th Global Fintech Festival (GFF) 2025 in Mumbai concluded last week, reinforcing its position as the world’s largest gathering of fintech and financial professionals. Operating under the banner ‘Empowering Finance for a Better World Powered by AI,’ the three-day event was less a conference and more a declaration of intent, spotlighting a new blueprint for scaling digital public goods and drawing a firm line on the role of private digital assets.

For our audience navigating their own paths toward regulatory clarity and AI adoption, GFF provided an essential look into the future of mass-market fintech a future defined by hyper-scale deployment and a strategic choice between state-backed and decentralized innovation.

The AI Imperative: From Pilot to Production

GFF’s core theme of Augmented Intelligence drove every major track, signaling a move past hypothetical discussions on AI and toward its practical integration across banking, payments, and credit. This is not just about generative AI, but using sophisticated models (like the NPCI’s Small Language Model) to enhance core utility:

• Intelligent Customer Service: The launch of the AI-based UPI Help demonstrated this commitment, creating an AI-powered support system to provide contextual guidance and manage complaints and mandates seamlessly.
• Infrastructure Modernization: The introduction of the Razorpay Banking Stack—a comprehensive payments infrastructure built for banks, underscored the push to leverage modern tech to accelerate speed, intelligence, and scale across institutional back-ends.

This focus on operational AI confirms that the world’s most successful scaling initiatives will be those that embed smart technology into the user experience, rather than treating AI as a bolt-on feature.

UPI’s Second Wave: A Billion-User Blueprint

The central narrative of the week was the strategic push to onboard the next 300 million users onto the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Experts noted that the strategies used to reach the initial 490 million are insufficient for this next wave, requiring deeper innovation into credit, access, and literacy for aspirational users in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.

This second wave of growth is being powered by major launches that bridge critical financial gaps:

1. Next-Gen Payment Tech: Frictionless Access and Security

Innovation focused on eliminating physical barriers and payment friction:

• Biometric Breakthroughs: The RBI launched a major initiative for biometric authentication to approve UPI payments via fingerprint or face recognition, removing the need for a PIN and simplifying use for millions.
• Ecosystem Tokenization: PhonePe Payment Gateway and Mastercard collaborated to launch ecosystem-wide device tokenization (live with ixigo). This initiative brings Mastercard’s network-tokenization capability to the PhonePe PG platform, expanding secure-payment options for online businesses and transforming the checkout experience for millions of customers.
• IoT Payments: UPI’s expansion into Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices was demonstrated, allowing users to pay for services like fuel or EV charging directly via connected cars, smart glasses, or smart TVs.
• Omnichannel Scale: UPI-leader PhonePe launched the SmartPOD, a device merging a POS terminal and SmartSpeaker to help small merchants accept both card and QR payments on a single, affordable unit.

2. Credit and Financial Inclusion

The lack of a credit trail for UPI users was flagged as a major barrier to deeper financial inclusion. New solutions directly address this:

• Credit-Linked Cards: PhonePe partnered to introduce the Wish Credit Card, which links a credit card to a Fixed Deposit (FD). This innovation provides a credit path for users with little to no credit history.
• Credit Reservations: The RBI launched UPI Reserve Pay, allowing users to block a pre-sanctioned credit limit for repeat purchases on e-commerce, cab, and food delivery platforms, simplifying the recurring transaction model.

3. Ecosystem Enablers

Fintechs are creating layers of utility to integrate payments into daily life:

• Loyalty as Currency: TWID launched a UPI App that enables users to spend accumulated loyalty reward points from banks and brands as fully fungible currency for online and offline purchases.
• Family Inclusion: Amazon Pay introduced UPI Circle, a feature allowing a primary account holder to manage and provide payment access to family members who do not hold a bank account.

The Regulatory Divide: State Control vs. Digital Assets

Perhaps the most telling strategic decision of the festival was the near-total exclusion of the global cryptocurrency and stablecoin discussion. While the theme was “Empowering Finance for a Better World,” the path to empowerment, as defined at GFF, is via state-controlled digital public goods and a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) focus.

This regulatory stance—which reportedly included a guideline to “AVOID CRYPTO REMARKS”—underscores a clear strategic choice. In contrast to other markets in Asia, the priority is to build trust and inclusion through regulated DPI, side-lining the $4 trillion private digital asset market. For investors, venture capital firms (VCFs), and innovators, this regulatory ambiguity presents a dilemma, with VCFs noting a “chilling effect” on stablecoin use cases and a risk of “brain-drain”.

The GFF 2025 demonstrated that while AI is the clear technology winner and UPI is the undisputed platform for inclusion, the future of digital assets remains a zero-sum regulatory battle between the power of public infrastructure and the promise of decentralized finance.