Fintech a valuable partner in building financial system of future: RBI Guv | Finance News

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has consistently viewed fintech as a “valuable partner” in building the financial system of the future, Governor Sanjay Malhotra said on Tuesday, highlighting the sector’s role in expanding financial inclusion, improving customer experience and enabling faster and more efficient credit delivery.

Addressing the Global Fintech Festival 2026 in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Malhotra said the central bank’s approach to fintech has been built around “continuous, open and constructive engagement” with start-ups, fintech companies and other stakeholders.

“The Reserve Bank has consistently viewed fintech as a valuable partner in building the financial system of the future,” Malhotra said.

He said the RBI’s regulatory sandbox, the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub and its continued dialogue with the fintech ecosystem reflected the regulator’s belief that “better policy emerges from continuous, open and constructive engagement.”

Over the past decade, fintech has “fundamentally reshaped the architecture of Indian finance”, taking banking “from the branch to the hand of every citizen”, Malhotra said. “Today, a shopkeeper in a small town, a farmer in a remote village, a young professional in a metro city, all of them transact, save and borrow through the same seamless digital rails,” he said, pointing to UPI, Aadhaar-enabled payment systems and the Jan Dhan ecosystem.

“This is financial inclusion not only as a policy aspiration but as lived everyday reality for hundreds of millions of Indians,” the governor said.

According to Malhotra, fintech has helped connect India’s diverse population to formal finance “faster and affordably”, while also transforming the efficiency of the financial system. He highlighted improvements in customer experience and financial infrastructure, including reductions in account-opening and payment-settlement times, lower transaction costs, stronger fraud detection through AI-driven analytics and real-time supervision.

“Perhaps nowhere is the impact more tangible than in credit delivery to our MSMEs,” Malhotra said. Through cash-flow-based lending, account aggregators and the Unified Lending Interface, fintech companies are helping bridge India’s MSME credit gap by providing “formal collateral-light credit” to small businesses that had historically remained outside traditional underwriting models, he said.

“This is credit reaching the last mile of entrepreneurs, powering jobs and livelihoods across the country,” he added.

Malhotra said the RBI has sought to encourage innovation while ensuring that trust remains at the foundation of the financial system. “We have encouraged self-regulation within the sector, we have supported the development of digital public infrastructure that fintechs can build upon, we have been open to new ideas and new players, we have promoted responsible innovation while safeguarding trust, that is the very foundation of finance and we will continue with this approach,” he said.

The governor said the RBI’s broader objective was to build a financial system that is “safer, more trustworthy, more inclusive, fair, efficient” and supportive of economic growth and public welfare.