Going from digital rails to global scale is India’s next fintech challenge

Article Summary

• India has become a global leader in real-time digital payments, with Harshil Mathur highlighting the scale of UPI and India’s public-private model.
• Razorpay’s Mathur argues that the collaboration between policymakers and private companies in building India’s digital rails is unusual globally.
• Peak XV’s Mohit Bhatnagar believes India’s startup ecosystem remains at an early stage, despite having created substantial market capitalisation.
• Together, the comments point to India’s next fintech challenge: converting world-class domestic infrastructure and entrepreneurial depth into globally scaled companies.

India has spent the past decade building something the rest of the world has increasingly come to admire: digital financial infrastructure that works at extraordinary scale. The harder question now is what India does with that advantage.

Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest session, “India to the World: Building Fintech Companies for Global Scale”, Harshil Mathur, CEO & Co-Founder, Razorpay, pointed to the remarkable scale of India’s real-time payments ecosystem, while Mohit Bhatnagar, Managing Director, Peak XV Partners, argued that the country’s startup story is still only beginning.

“Today 49% of all real time transactions in the world happen in India. More than 1 billion transactions are happening through UPI. Today, everything is at a level that is real time it is taken granted, but it is not easy. The way India has built public private collaboration, with policymakers putting down the rails and the private players building on top of that is unique to India, I haven’t seen it in any part of the world.”

Mathur’s observation captures one of India’s most consequential economic experiments. UPI has become so deeply embedded in everyday life that the underlying technological achievement can be easy to overlook. Instant payments, interoperability, QR codes, and increasingly seamless digital transactions have become ordinary experiences for consumers and businesses.

Yet the architecture underneath is anything but ordinary. The Indian model has involved public institutions establishing common infrastructure and standards, while private companies compete to build products and experiences on top of those rails. That combination has allowed innovation to happen at the application layer without requiring every company to build the underlying infrastructure from scratch.

The next opportunity is to take that entrepreneurial energy beyond India’s borders. Bhatnagar’s comments provide a useful reality check. “India has arrived in terms of creating large market caps. But it is still the tip of the iceberg. If you put the market cap of all Indian start-ups together, it is a mere $150-$200 billion. I have no doubt that India’s start-up ecosystem will produce double digit percentage growth in time, but the direction is great.”

There is an important distinction here between building a large domestic market and building globally consequential companies.

India offers fintech entrepreneurs an extraordinary testing ground. Its population, digital adoption, formalisation of financial services, and sophisticated public infrastructure allow companies to solve problems at scale. But success at home does not automatically translate into success overseas.

Global expansion brings different regulatory systems, consumer behaviour, competitive landscapes, currencies, and expectations. Companies have to demonstrate that what worked because of India’s unique digital rails can either travel with them or be rebuilt for other markets.

That makes the next phase of Indian fintech potentially more difficult, but also more valuable. The country has already demonstrated that it can build infrastructure that reaches hundreds of millions of people. It has created a generation of entrepreneurs accustomed to solving for scale. And it has developed a public-private model in which government infrastructure and private innovation can reinforce each other.

Now comes the test of whether that ecosystem can produce companies whose relevance extends well beyond India.

The ambition is bigger than exporting UPI-style payments. It is about exporting Indian fintech expertise, technology, business models, and eventually global financial infrastructure.

Mathur’s comments explain why India has a strong foundation. Bhatnagar’s suggest how much remains to be built. The rails are already here. The next race is to see how far Indian companies can travel on them.