Mumbai, September 10, 2026: Walk into Global Fintech Fest on its first day and the most striking thing is not the scale of the event. It is how quickly the conversation has moved.
For years, India’s fintech story could be told largely through one defining achievement: payments. UPI changed the way millions of Indians transact, merchants accept money and businesses think about digital finance. But at GFF 2026, the message coming through from the stage, the exhibition floor and a string of new product announcements was that the next chapter will have to be about much more than moving money.
The first day of the four-day fintech gathering in Mumbai brought together banks, fintech companies, technology firms and financial institutions around a common question: what happens when digital financial infrastructure becomes intelligent enough to understand intent, make decisions and act?
That question gave Day 1 much of its character.
From agentic AI and autonomous commerce to cross-border payments, new lending platforms and merchant-focused financial products, the announcements were less about launching another standalone fintech product and more about reshaping what financial services can do once technology begins working in the background.
The rise of the financial agent
If there was one technology that repeatedly surfaced across conversations and launches, it was agentic AI.
BharatPe brought the concept directly to the merchant ecosystem with an AI assistant designed to go beyond answering questions. Built on Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, the assistant is designed to understand a merchant’s business and interaction history, communicate in the preferred language and take actions across more than 60 live systems.
Pine Labs approached the same shift from the commerce side.
Its agentic commerce initiatives point towards a future where an AI system does not simply recommend a product or service but can potentially execute the transaction within predefined boundaries. The company’s payment infrastructure is being developed to allow agents to participate in UPI and card-based transactions while operating within user-defined controls.
The significance lies in the change of role.
Traditional digital finance has largely been user-led: a customer opens an app, searches for a service, selects an option and authorises a transaction.
Agentic finance turns that model around.
The customer expresses an intention. The technology interprets it, finds the relevant option and, within agreed parameters, carries out the task.
That is a considerably bigger proposition than simply putting a chatbot inside a banking or payments app.
From paying digitally to transacting across borders
Payments, meanwhile, are not disappearing from the GFF conversation. They are becoming more expansive.
PhonePe and Visa announced a suite of payment capabilities covering Tap to Pay, Cross Border Scan to Pay and Smart Accept, bringing together contactless payments, online tokenisation and cross-border QR capabilities. The partnership is aimed at making payments work more seamlessly across consumers, merchants and international transactions.
Jio Payments Solutions also entered the cross-border payments conversation through a partnership with Citi, with a service aimed at helping Indian businesses accept international payments.
Together, these developments point to a broader ambition: making India’s digital payments infrastructure useful not only within the country but increasingly at the edges of global commerce.
This is particularly significant as India’s fintech ecosystem looks beyond domestic transaction volumes and towards exporting the infrastructure, products and capabilities that have emerged from the country’s digital public infrastructure journey.
Credit is becoming more contextual
The other major thread running through Day 1 was credit.
Yubi launched Pye, a retail lending platform designed to connect borrowers with a network of lenders rather than routing every application to a single institution. The idea is to match borrowers with lenders based on their profile, requirements and timelines.
It is a subtle but important shift in the way digital lending is being positioned.
Instead of asking consumers to navigate a fragmented lending market themselves, technology increasingly sits between the borrower and the financial institution, attempting to make the process more relevant and transparent.
Yubi also introduced TopScore, a credit-health platform designed to make credit information easier for consumers to understand.
The underlying direction is clear: credit is moving closer to becoming an embedded and contextual financial experience rather than a standalone product that customers seek only when they need a loan.
The merchant remains at the centre
While consumer fintech often gets the spotlight, Day 1 of GFF also reinforced how important India’s merchant ecosystem remains.
BharatPe’s agentic AI push is aimed squarely at businesses that need to manage multiple aspects of their operations, while Pine Labs is building towards an environment where merchants and AI agents can interact through financial infrastructure.
Amazon Pay, meanwhile, partnered with Kotak Mahindra Bank on co-branded credit cards for small business owners on Amazon Business, combining business spending benefits with an interest-free credit period and other ecosystem-linked offerings.
The direction is noteworthy.
India’s next fintech opportunity may not simply be about acquiring more users. It could be about becoming more deeply embedded in the everyday operating systems of small businesses — from accepting payments and accessing credit to managing purchases and eventually delegating routine financial decisions to intelligent systems.
The real shift: from fintech products to fintech infrastructure
Perhaps the most interesting takeaway from Day 1 was that many of the announcements were not trying to create another destination app.
They were building infrastructure for what comes next.
Agentic commerce requires payment protocols.
Cross-border commerce requires interoperable payment rails.
Digital lending requires systems that can connect borrowers, lenders and data.
AI-led finance requires trust, identity, security and clearly defined permissions.
In other words, the fintech industry is gradually moving from building interfaces that customers interact with towards building systems that can operate intelligently underneath those interfaces.
That shift also explains why the conversations around AI at GFF 2026 are increasingly accompanied by discussions on security, consent, tokenisation, authentication and consumer protection.
The more autonomy technology receives, the more important the guardrails become.
Day 1 set the tone for what comes next
GFF 2026’s first day did not suggest that India’s fintech story is moving away from the foundations that made it successful.
Instead, it showed those foundations being extended.
UPI is becoming a platform for new forms of commerce. Digital identity and data infrastructure are becoming inputs for more intelligent financial products. AI is moving from customer support towards decision-making and execution. And fintech companies are increasingly looking at how Indian innovations can participate in global financial flows.
The event’s broader message is therefore not simply that AI has arrived in fintech.
It is that India’s fintech ecosystem is entering a phase where technology is expected to do more than make financial services faster.
It is expected to make them more contextual, autonomous, accessible and connected.
And if Day 1 was any indication, the next big fintech story may not be about the next payment app or lending product at all.
It may be about what happens when the financial system starts acting on our behalf.
-By Muskan Dengra
