By Mumbai is hosting the seventh edition of the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) this week. The event runs from September 8 to 11 at the Jio World Convention Center in Bandra Kurla Complex. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the festival on September 8, marking his third straight appearance and his first as the formal inaugurator.
GFF has grown into one of the world’s largest fintech gatherings. This year’s edition expects to draw more than 100,000 delegates, 8,000 participating institutions, and over 5,000 startups. Organizers have lined up more than 450 sessions, 350-plus exhibitors, and 200-plus product launches across the four days.
Who Runs GFF, and Why It Matters
The Payments Council of India, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), and the Fintech Convergence Council jointly organize the festival. The Reserve Bank of India and the Securities and Exchange Board of India also back the event as key institutional partners.
Since its 2020 launch, GFF has become India’s central platform for fintech policy dialogue. Regulators, bankers, founders, and investors from more than 80 countries use it to compare notes on payments, lending, and emerging technology. NSE CEO Ashish Kumar Chauhan called it a highlight of India’s financial calendar and praised the scale of this year’s turnout.
This Year’s Theme: Potential to Impact
GFF 2026 carries the theme “Potential to Impact: Agentic AI, Tokenization, Quantum — Trusted, Connected, Global Systems for Inclusive Finance.” The framing signals a shift from experimenting with new technology to deploying it at national scale.
Three technologies anchor the agenda. Agentic AI covers systems that can sense a situation, decide on an action, and execute it with minimal human input. Tokenization converts real assets into digital tokens that move across blockchain-based systems. Quantum computing promises faster processing for encryption, risk modeling, and fraud detection.
The timing carries extra weight this year. UPI, India’s flagship real-time payments network, completes a full decade of operation in 2026.
PM Modi’s Four-Point Agenda for Fintech
In his inaugural address, Modi congratulated India’s fintech industry and welcomed delegates from across the world. He then set out four priorities he wants the sector to adopt.
First, Modi called for India to build top-notch cybersecurity as financial services lean further into AI and digital infrastructure. Second, he asked the industry to develop its own ethical data-protection standards rather than wait for regulation to catch up. Third, he pushed for a stronger innovation ecosystem built on closer ties between regulators and industry. Fourth, he proposed a Fintech Consumer Protection Index that would rate companies transparently on how well they treat customers.
Modi also urged fintech firms to look beyond India’s borders and support UPI’s global expansion. He framed it as the next stage of the network’s growth after a decade of domestic success.
NPCI’s Big Announcements at GFF 2026
NPCI used the festival to unveil a cluster of new payment infrastructure. The most closely watched is the Unified Agent Protocol (UAP). It is a framework that lets AI agents make small digital payments on a user’s behalf without approval for every transaction.
UAP builds on two existing UPI features. UPI Circle lets a primary account holder delegate payment authority to a secondary user, a role an AI agent can now step into. Reserve Pay lets a customer block funds in advance for a series of future debits to one merchant. Under UAP, banks may revisit the monthly caps on both mechanisms to suit agent-driven spending. NPCI had already demonstrated a pilot version of agentic payments at GFF 2025. The demo used a grocery-ordering assistant built with Google’s Gemini, BigBasket, Google Pay, and Razorpay.
NPCI also introduced Agentic Orchestration and Messaging (AtOM), an AI-driven platform built to handle complex integration and partner onboarding across UPI. AtOM generates digitally signed, machine-readable records of each interaction, giving banks and merchants a verifiable audit trail for compliance checks.
Alongside these AI tools, the Department of Financial Services (DFS) launched open-source Android ATMs designed to cut costs for banks deploying new machines. DFS Secretary Sanjay Lohiya also expanded the Credit Line on UPI facility. It now covers government-backed schemes, including the Kisan Credit Card and the PM MUDRA Yojana. The move lets beneficiaries link pre-sanctioned government credit directly to their UPI apps.
Why Agentic Payments Matter and What Could Go Wrong
India already processes a staggering volume of digital payments. UPI handled 24.51 billion transactions worth Rs 29.82 lakh crore in August 2026 alone, a 22% jump from the previous year. Layering AI agents onto that scale could push adoption even higher. Agents can shop, compare prices, and check out without a person tapping through each step.
India isn’t alone in this race. Visa launched its Trusted Agent Protocol in October 2025, and Stripe built an Agentic Commerce Suite for AI-driven checkout. Mastercard completed its first authenticated agentic transaction in New Delhi in June 2026. NPCI is building the agent layer into public UPI infrastructure rather than a private network. The goal is to keep the rails open to every bank and fintech player, rather than handing control to one company.
The open question is fraud. India already battles significant UPI fraud built around tricking people into approving payments they shouldn’t. Removing the per-transaction approval step removes the last human checkpoint in that chain. NPCI has not yet published the rules governing agent authentication, spending limits, and dispute resolution. Those details will determine how safely the protocol scales.
What Else to Watch
GFF 2026 also features cross-border UPI expansion, with Modi pointing to remittance corridors as a priority for taking India’s payment stack global. Expect further sessions this week on quantum-safe encryption, asset tokenization, and India’s Digital Public Infrastructure model. Banks, insurers, and NBFCs are also lining up deal announcements on the exhibition floor.
For an event built around scale, GFF 2026 is trying to make a bigger point. India wants its fintech playbook, from UPI to Aadhaar-linked identity, treated as a template other countries can adopt.
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