Demat 2.0 enabled ₹1,025 crore in real bond issuances through tokenised securities and digital-rupee settlement at GFF 2026.
MUMBAI: The 7th Global Fintech Fest ran September 8-11 at Jio World Centre, drawing over 538,000 attendees, 43,000 institutions and nearly 27,000 startups under the theme “Agentic AI, Tokenisation, Quantum.” Prime Minister Modi opened the event citing India’s 7.8% Q1 GDP growth and a Japan Credit Rating Agency upgrade to A-, its first such upgrade in three decades, framing the festival’s technical announcements against this broader macroeconomic backdrop.
What followed was less a single headline launch than a cluster of infrastructure announcements spanning capital markets, payments and AI governance, several of which moved from pilot to actual production during the four days.
Demat 2.0: Bonds Settling in Hours, Not Days
The most structurally significant launch was Demat 2.0, unveiled jointly by RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra and SEBI Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey on September 10. This system combines blockchain-recorded tokenised debt securities with the RBI’s wholesale digital rupee for cash settlement, enabling atomic delivery-versus-payment where the bond and the money move simultaneously, cutting corporate bond settlement from the usual T+2 or T+3 days down to same-day funding. This isn’t theoretical: REC Limited, Larsen & Toubro and IIFL Finance actually issued ₹1,025 crore in bonds through the new system during the festival itself, with smart contracts automating coupon payments directly to investors’ digital rupee wallets. Existing investor protections, credit ratings and depository rules remain unchanged and no new demat account is required, just linking an existing account to a wholesale CBDC wallet.
UPI Gets Offline Payments and a Safety Switch
NPCI and the RBI launched several consumer-facing UPI upgrades on September 10. UPI Tap & Pay enables contactless payments up to ₹5,000 without requiring the user’s phone to have internet access, relying instead on the merchant terminal’s connection. MyUPI, built on NPCI’s own language model called FiMI, introduces a “Safety Switch” letting users instantly freeze suspicious pending transactions, plus the ability to delink phone numbers from payment aliases. Android ATMs, piloted with nine banks including SBI and Bank of Baroda, now issue physical RuPay cards and generate merchant QR codes on the spot. Biometric-authenticated UPI transactions have already crossed 6.29 billion cumulatively as of end-August.
NPCI’s Bet on Sovereign AI Infrastructure
At the Bharat AI Zone, NPCI introduced AiNxt, an open-source platform letting banks build AI agents using their own models rather than being locked into a single vendor and AtOM, which automates the technical coordination NPCI needs when rolling out changes across hundreds of partner banks, replacing what used to be manual, email-driven coordination with cryptographically signed, machine-to-machine messaging.
Private Players Built Their Own Agents
Commercial innovation ran in parallel. BharatPe deployed an internal agentic AI assistant on Google’s Gemini platform capable of operating across 60-plus internal systems, alongside a financial literacy tool featuring an AI avatar of cricketer Rohit Sharma. Pine Labs and L&T Finance built an agentic commerce stack letting AI agents execute transactions like flight bookings within preset spending limits. PhonePe and Visa launched SoftPOS tools turning merchant smartphones into card readers, alongside expanded cross-border QR payment support across 14 countries.
Opening Doors for Cross-Border Money
Several launches targeted international capital flows. Xflow partnered with HSBC to let foreign businesses collect payments from Indian buyers via UPI without needing a local legal entity. Through GIFT City, SBICAP Securities and Appreciate Broking launched a platform giving Indian retail investors fractional access, starting at just $1, to over 8,000 US-listed stocks and ETFs, a notable widening of access to global markets for ordinary Indian investors.
The “Know Your Agent” Question
Perhaps the most forward-looking conversation came from SBI Chairman C.S. Setty, who argued that as AI shifts from generating advice to executing transactions independently, the industry needs to move from “Know Your Customer” to “Know Your Agent.” He outlined six requirements: unique cryptographic identities for AI agents, real-time authentication, clearly defined consent boundaries, hard spending caps, auditable decision trails and instant kill-switch mechanisms. Setty was blunt about the stakes, arguing that financial services cannot tolerate the 99% accuracy rates acceptable in other AI applications; at India’s transaction scale, anything less than near-total precision creates real harm. Separately, Ant International, Mastercard and Visa announced they’re jointly developing a cross-system KYA framework for shared agent credentials and risk scoring.
What’s Real Versus What’s Still a Roadmap
It’s worth being clear-eyed about where things actually stand. Tokenisation moved decisively from sandbox to production, ₹1,025 crore in real bonds settled through Demat 2.0 is concrete proof, though its success now depends on whether Phase 2 secondary market trading actually develops liquidity. Agentic AI infrastructure launched, but genuine adoption metrics, transaction volumes through AtOM, usage rates for MyUPI’s safety features, remain to be seen in the coming months. Quantum resilience, meanwhile, stayed firmly in the policy-discussion phase, acknowledged as necessary but without concrete deployment timelines, reflecting the longer horizon quantum threats present.
What to Watch
Three things will determine whether GFF 2026’s announcements translate into durable change: whether secondary market trading actually develops for tokenised bonds rather than fragmenting into illiquid pools, whether the RBI and SEBI issue formal regulatory circulars establishing binding KYA rules and liability frameworks for AI agent errors and how quickly Demat 2.0 expands beyond its initial three-issuer pilot. For now, the festival delivered a substantive mix of production-ready infrastructure and clearly articulated next-phase questions, a useful, honest snapshot of where India’s fintech ambitions currently stand.
About the Author
