Global Fintech Fest 2026 Concludes In Mumbai With Focus On Agentic AI And Global UPI Push

The seventh edition of the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) 2026 concluded in Mumbai on Friday, closing out four days of discussions and product launches that industry leaders said would define the next phase of fintech growth in India and beyond. The event, held at the Jio World Centre and Trident BKC, brought together the Payments Council of India, the National Payments Corporation of India and the Fintech Convergence Council as organisers, alongside delegates from more than 80 countries.

From Inauguration To Closing Session

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated this year's edition on Tuesday, the first time he has formally opened the fest despite attending for three consecutive years. His keynote leaned heavily on India's economic momentum, citing 7.8 per cent GDP growth in the April-June quarter and describing the Unified Payments Interface as the undisputed champion of the country's fintech revolution. He used the platform to push fintech companies to take India's digital payments infrastructure global, a theme that carried through to the fest's closing session four days later.

By the time GFF wrapped up, organisers said the event had drawn well over 5,000 startups, thousands of participating institutions and hundreds of investors, built around this year's theme of "Potential to Impact" spanning agentic AI, tokenisation and quantum computing.

Visa, Gnani.ai And BharatPe Lead Announcements

Visa used the fest to showcase live agentic commerce payment experiences developed in partnership with a cluster of Indian banks and fintechs, including Federal Bank, IndusInd Bank, RBL Bank, Cashfree Payments, CCAvenue, Juspay, Paytm Payments Services, PayU, Pine Labs and Razorpay. The demonstrations were built around existing Visa infrastructure such as tokenisation and passkey-based authentication, aimed at letting AI agents handle a shopper's journey from discovery to payment while keeping the transaction secure. Visa also released a whitepaper on strengthening cyber resilience through frontier AI, alongside an open-source security tool intended to help the wider financial ecosystem detect and fix vulnerabilities faster.

Bengaluru-based Gnani.ai announced an expansion of its Artha Sovereign AI platform for banking, financial services and insurance companies, adding more than 200 pre-built workflows covering areas such as underwriting, reconciliation, lending, risk management and compliance. Separately, BharatPe's enterprise arm BharatPeX launched a new payment gateway supporting more than 100 payment methods with intelligent routing across acquiring partners, while the company also introduced BharatPe Flex, a consumer credit product built on UPI's credit-line features.

Industry Voices On What Comes Next

Executives who spoke at the closing session framed the fest's outcomes as a shift from talking about emerging technology's potential to actually deploying it responsibly. A Comviva executive pointed to the push to take UPI global as part of a broader trend of interoperable payment platforms reducing friction for consumers and businesses in emerging markets. An executive from IDEMIA Secure Transactions said the convergence of agentic AI, tokenisation and quantum technology meant security frameworks needed to keep pace, calling for financial institutions to build in adaptability rather than treat security as a one-time fix.

Why It Matters

For India's fintech sector, GFF has increasingly served as a barometer of where the industry is placing its bets, and this year's edition leaned firmly toward artificial intelligence embedded directly into payment infrastructure rather than as a customer-facing add-on. With UPI processing tens of billions of transactions a month domestically, the announcements around agentic commerce and cross-border interoperability suggest Indian payment companies are positioning themselves to export that infrastructure rather than simply scale it at home.

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