Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai, highlighting India's robust economic performance and outlining the government's vision for the next phase of fintech development. India achieved 7.8% GDP growth in the challenging April-June 2026 quarter, while a Japanese credit rating agency recently upgraded India's sovereign ratings to the A category for the first time in three decades, reflecting confidence in India's growth momentum and macroeconomic stability.
The address focused extensively on UPI's transformational impact, noting that the platform processed over 2,400 crore transactions in August 2026 alone, averaging more than 5 million transactions every 10 minutes. UPI has now expanded to 11 countries internationally, with the Prime Minister announcing plans to interconnect payment systems with other countries following the successful model implemented with Singapore, particularly targeting countries with significant Indian populations and trade relationships to reduce remittance costs.
The government has extended the PM SVANidhi scheme until 2030, with studies showing that street vendor beneficiaries have achieved average annual income increases of more than 20% alongside improvements in housing, nutrition, healthcare access, and children's education. The Prime Minister emphasized that UPI was instrumental in the scheme's success and called for expanding fintech beyond payments to increase the share of credit transactions, insurance, savings, investments, and pensions, particularly for small businesses and informal workers whose needs traditional financial models cannot serve efficiently.
Looking forward, PM Modi outlined four key priorities for the fintech sector: achieving top-notch cybersecurity standards, developing industry-specific ethical data protection standards, building a strong regulator-industry innovation ecosystem, and creating a fintech consumer protection index to provide transparent company ratings. The speech emphasized that emerging technologies like Agentic AI, tokenization, and quantum computing present new opportunities for the financial sector that must be leveraged while maintaining the core values of scale, security, democratization of technology, and public trust that have driven India's fintech success so far.