“India’s next Fintech leap must build trust”: Shri Devendra Fadnavis at GFF 2026

India has spent the past decade proving that sophisticated financial technology can be made remarkably simple. The next challenge, Maharashtra Chief Minister Shri Devendra Fadnavis suggested at the Global Fintech Fest, is considerably harder: turning that technological capability into broader economic impact.

Speaking during his address on “Potential to Impact: Agentic AI – Tokenisation – Quantum”, Fadnavis ji positioned tokenisation as one of the technologies that could reshape how capital moves through the economy, provided it is approached as infrastructure rather than speculation.

“For us, tokenisation is not about speculation. It is about bringing about transparency. It is about improving liquidity. Ultimately, it is about transforming dormant wealth into economic opportunity. That is what I mean by moving from opportunity to impact.”

Tokenisation is often discussed through the lens of digital assets and cryptocurrencies, but its larger potential lies in representing real-world assets digitally, potentially making them easier to divide, transfer, track, and transact. In a country with significant pools of wealth locked into assets that can be difficult to access or trade efficiently, that could have meaningful consequences.

The opportunity, however, depends on trust. Fadnavis ji used UPI as the example of what India has done particularly well. The payments infrastructure is technologically sophisticated, yet its interface is simple enough to be used by millions of people in their everyday lives.

“Technology has never suffered from a lack of innovation. Our challenge is to convert that into impact for people. UPI has shown that technology is sophisticated enough for the world‘s largest institutions and also simple enough for a vegetable vendor on the street. That is, to me, the real Indian tech story. We have democratised payments. Now, we have to think about creating the next architecture of trust.”

That last point may prove to be the more consequential one.

India’s fintech story has largely been about access. Bank accounts became easier to open, payments became instant, credit became increasingly digital, and financial services became accessible through a smartphone. The next phase will require confidence in systems that increasingly operate behind the scenes.

Agentic AI could make financial decisions and execute transactions with increasing autonomy. Tokenisation could change how assets are represented and exchanged. Quantum computing could eventually alter the foundations of financial computation and security. Each promises significant gains, but each also introduces questions around accountability, security, explainability, ownership, and control.

That puts trust alongside technology as a critical piece of India’s next financial architecture.

The country’s advantage may lie precisely in what it has already learned from UPI: infrastructure succeeds when complexity remains largely invisible to the user while safeguards remain robust underneath.

For tokenisation, that means building systems where ownership is clear, transactions are traceable, liquidity is meaningful, and regulatory frameworks can keep pace. For agentic AI, it means knowing when an autonomous system can act, when it must seek human approval, and who carries responsibility when it makes a mistake.

The larger message from Fadnavis ji was therefore less about any individual technology than about India’s ability to turn technological sophistication into something economically useful and widely trusted.

India has already demonstrated that it can build digital public infrastructure at extraordinary scale. The next test is whether the same philosophy can be applied to the emerging architecture of finance.

The opportunity is enormous. The impact will depend on whether India can build the trust to unlock it. As Fadnavis ji said, ” the question is not if India will innovate, it is what it will innovate next”.